I am studying transport of something that can bind to and be inhibited by magnesium, so I am excluding magnesium from the transport buffer. I find that after washing the cells and incubating therm in this buffer for 20 minutes there is no obvious transport function. Will zero magnesium cause the transporters to fail due to impaired metabolism and other cellular functions, causing damage ? It's an exchanger that does not directly use ATP.
Hi Adam, there are intracellular stores of Mg++, when they are depleted my hunch is that the cells will go into stasis.
Most cells are programmed to behave differently in cases of feast or famine.
I resolved my issue. The problem was with my detection method. I've moved to using radiolabel instead of HPLC, and it turns out removal of calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate, and chloride still allowed the cells to transport correctly. Albeit in 5 minutes instead of 20 minutes, which I didn't test again.
- Badges
- Science method