Role of Aromatic Side Chains in the Binding of Volatile General Anesthetics to a Four-alpha-helix Bundle.
Currently, the mechanism by which anesthesia occurs is thought to involve the direct binding of inhaled anesthetics to ligand-gated ion channels. This hypothesis is being studied using four--helix bundles as model systems for the transmembrane domains of the natural "receptor" proteins. This study concerns the role in anesthetic binding played by aromatic side chains in the binding cavity of a fou