this insert, dependent upon calcium concentration. Previous data (Dopico et al., 1998) indicate that alcohol acts as a partial agonist of the BK channel, with calcium as full agonist. Another intriguing possibility derives from recent work, which has shown that bilayer thickness can affect alcohol’s potentiation of BK activity (Yuan et al., 2007), allowing speculation that if the different isoforms reside in different membrane domains (e.g. lipid rafts), this could lead to different adaptation patterns.
