Sometimes I scare myself. They say you dream about what’s in your heart (or rather, that mass of gray matter in your head people like to call the “heart”), but last night was a clear counterexample of that adage. In my dream, I was explaining to a student how changes in ion affinity due to mutations in one amino acid of a protein doesn’t necessarily mean that particular amino acid is directly involved, either mechanically or electrostatically, with the binding site for the ion due to the possibility of allosteric interactions involving that amino acid and the binding site effecting the observed change in affinity. (Read on …)