Fig. 1.

Cartoon representation of the structural model of the rat αENaC subunit. Each ENaC subunit has two transmembrane regions, a large extracellular loop and a small “Pre-TM2” region (not represented in the model) that may form part of the selectivity filter [126]. For all the subunits, the C- and N-termini are intracellular. The sequence alignment for modeling the structure of rat αENaC was generated by extending the one provided by Stockand et al. [135]. A portion of the ‘hypervariable region’ was included in our alignment to account for the furin sites in this model [135]. The structural model was generated using Medusa [42, 163] with the crystal structure of cASIC as the template [69]. Regions that do not have a template were modeled as loops using Modeller [46]