Relating Structure to Function in Sodium Pump Liposomes

The purified sodium pump reconstituted in artificial membranes expresses all the features of the pump system described by physiologists and biochemists in intact cells. In other words: it is a fully autonomous molecular machine, which does need neither interaction with other membrane systems to be functional, nor interaction with hypothetical intra- and extracellular regulators: all the required information for the pump activity is contained within the sodium pump molecule (Na, K-ATPase) itself. This overview of basic properties of the sodium pump may be interesting for students in biology or medicine, as well as for researchers interested in ion-transport systems. Yet it is written in a way which should allow also the non-specialist to comprehend the working of the sodium pump, all the more since there are many illustrations and didactic schemes.