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) itse…