High Blood Pressure Caused by Punctured Cell Membranes

A new discovery by researchers from the University of Southern Denmark may lead to new and better medication for high blood pressure. Scientists have identified that mutated proteins can cause holes in a cell's membrane, which could cause and/or exacerbate high blood pressure.

Wojciech Kopec, a PhD. Student from the Center for Biomembrane Physics at the University of Southern Denmark said that colleagues from the University of Aarhus discovered years ago that a specific mutated protein is associated with high blood pressure, but it wasn't until now that the exact mechanism of causation was unearthed.

The mechanism that Kopec and his colleagues discovered was that "the mutated protein leads to the formation of holes in a protein sitting in a cell's membrane, and so the cell can no longer control what is allowed into and out of the cell interior." They described the new mechanism in an article on the University of Southern Denmark website.

Furthermore, the holes form where the cell controls its content of salts, which is an immense factor when dealing with issues of hypertension. A healthy cell has full control of how many sodium ions must be removed in order to maintain a perfect salt balance in the organism.  When this is disrupted, many diseases can be a cause for concern, most notably hypertension.

When holes are formed from the mutations, sodium ions can further penetrate the cell and increase the salt levels. This research information, Kopec believes, is useful for the development of drugs within pharmaceutical industry.

"Medicine is molecules, and therefore it is, in principle, easy to develop a molecular formula that can close the holes in the membrane," says Kopec later in the article.

The mechanism that leads to the formation of holes in the cell's membrane was found while Kopec and his colleagues ran a computer simulation on Horseshoe 6, which is one of the country's most powerful computer clusters.