So what I'm thinking about is something like this: imagine an enzyme,present at two sites on the membrane and regulated by an inhibitor. Now a toxin comes along and breaks the weak bonds to the inhibitor, stripping them off. Information about which site was inhibited is gone.
If the inhibitor has some further chemical involvement with the toxin, or if the toxin pops the enzymes off the membrane all together you have more problems. You might not know how many enzymes were inhibited, which sites were occupied, or which were inhibited.
I could also imagine more exotic cases where a toxin induces a folding change in one protein, which allows it to accept a regulator molecule meant for a different protein. Now to figure out our system we'd need to scan at significantly smaller scales to try to discern those regulator molecules. I don't have the expertise to estimate if this is likely.
To reiterate, I am not by any means a neuroscientist (my training is physics and my work is statistics), so its possible this sort of information just isn't that important, but my suspicion is that it is.
Edited to fix an embarrassing except/accept mistake.
(Scanning at significantly smaller scales should always be assumed to be fine as long as end states are distinguishable up to thermal noise!)
So what I'm thinking about is something like this: imagine an enzyme,present at two sites on the membrane and regulated by an inhibitor. Now a toxin comes along and breaks the weak bonds to the inhibitor, stripping them off. Information about which site was inhibited is gone.
Okay, I agree that if this takes place at a temperature where molecules are still diffusing at a rapid pace and there's no molecular sign of ...
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