ABSTRACT
The first transient receptor potential (TRP) ion channel was identified as a Drosophila locus that gave rise to a phenotype in which the photoreceptor light response decayed to baseline during prolonged illumination. The mid-1990s through the early 2000s were a particularly productive time for identification of many new TRP subfamilies and subfamily members. This is apparent from the rapid increase in the number of publications on TRP channels listed in PubMed; once many new TRP channels were identified, work on understanding their physiology progressed rapidly. Six subfamilies of TRP channels have been identified in mammals, with an additional subfamily found in invertebrates and nonmammalian vertebrate animals. These are TRP canonical, TRP vanilloid, TRP ankyrin, TRP melastatin, TRP polycystin, and TRP mucolipin. The number of TRP channel structures that have been solved has grown rapidly since the first TRPV1 structure was solved only a few short years ago.
