With the ability to manipulate bicarbonate and carbon dioxide levels for the first time, Boron and his colleagues soon discovered in squid a previously unknown bicarbonate transporter, which they described in a 1994 Nature paper that also announced the rapid mixing technique. Over the past two summers, they have continued to study this newly-identified transporter. While the Boron team has continued the work in squid, the rapid mixing technique should also be useful in studying medically important questions in mammalian models. CO2 or bicarbonate or acid in the brain stimulates breathing. When there's too much CO2 in your blood, somehow that causes the nerves in the brain stem to cause you to breath faster.
Nobody really knows how that happens.
Now we should be able to figure that out. The first medically important question Boron's group is tackling is the kidney question. Back at Yale, Zhao has been applying the rapid mixing technique, worked out in Woods Hole on squid axons, to rabbit kidney tubules. We were thinking it would be one or the other. If we hadn't learned to manipulate them, forever on we would have been thinking it was one or the other.