Ion fluxes through nano-pores and transmembrane channels
Abstract
We introduce an implicit solvent Molecular Dynamics approach for calculating ionic fluxes through narrow nano-pores and transmembrane channels. The method relies on a dual-control- volume grand-canonical molecular dynamics (DCV-GCMD) simulation and the analytical solution for the electrostatic potential inside a cylindrical nano-pore recently obtained by Levin [Europhys. Lett., 76, 163 (2006)]. The theory is used to calculate the ionic fluxes through an artificial trans-membrane c hannel which mimics the antibacterial gramicidin A channel. Both current-voltage and current-concentration relations are calculated under various experimental conditions. We show that our results are comparable to the characteristics associated to the gramicidin A pore, specially the existence of two binding sites inside the pore and the observed saturation in the current-concentration profiles.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1108.5366,
title = {Ion fluxes through nano-pores and transmembrane channels},
author = {José Rafael Bordin and Alexandre Diehl and Marcia C. Barbosa and Yan Levin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1108.5366},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
15 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review E