Related papers: Ion Channels, Natural Nanovalves
Recently, it has been suggested that ion channel selectivity filter may exhibit quantum coherence, which may be appropriate to explain ion selection and conduction processes. Potassium channels play a vital role in many physiological…
Bubbles in ion channel proteins have been proposed to be the bistable gates that control current flow. Gating currents associated with channel gating would then be an electrical signature of bubble breaking and formation, arising from the…
Ions in water are important in biology, from molecules to organs. Classically, ions in water are treated as ideal noninteracting particles in a perfect gas. Excess free energy of ion was zero. Mathematics was not available to deal…
Ionic transport in nanopores is a fundamentally and technologically important problem in view of its occurrence in biological processes and its impact on novel DNA sequencing applications. Using microscopic calculations, here we show that…
Ion channels regulate many essential properties of biological cells, especially the membrane potential. Despite decades of efforts on artificial channels, it remains a great challenge to mimic the dipole potential-an indispensable…
Angstrom-scale fluidic channels are ubiquitous in nature, and play an important role in regulating cellular traffic, signaling, and responding to stimuli. Synthetic channels are now a reality with the emergence of several cutting-edge…
Membranes are ubiquitous in nature with primary functions that include adaptive filtering and selective transport of chemical and molecular species. Being critical to cellular functions, they are also fundamental in many areas of science…
Polymer materials with low water uptake exhibit a highly heterogeneous interior, characterized by water clusters in the form of nanodroplets and nanochannels. Here, based on our recent insights from computer simulations, we argue that water…
Nanofluidics, the field interested in flows at the smallest scales, has grown at a fast pace, reaching an ever finer control offluidic and ionic transport at the molecular level. Still, artificial pores are far from reaching the wealth of…
There has been tremendous experimental progress in the last decade in identifying the structure and function of biological pores (ion channels) and fabricating synthetic pores. Despite this progress, many questions still remain about the…
Electrostatic interaction between ions in an ionic channel and the charge fluctuations in the channel mouth are considered. It is shown that the charge fluctuations can be enhanced in the channels with low dielectric constant and result in…
Voltage-activated ion channels vary randomly between open and closed states, influenced by the membrane potential and other factors. Signal transduction is enhanced by noise in a simple ion channel model. The enhancement occurs in a finite…
We consider ion transport through protein ion channels in lipid membranes and water-filled nanopores in silicon films. It is known that, due to the large ratio of dielectric constants of water and the surrounding material, an ion placed…
Mechanosensitive ion nanochannels regulate transport by undergoing conformational changes within nanopores. However, achieving precise control over these conformational states remains a major challenge for both artificial soft or solid…
We consider an anisotropically two-dimensional diffusion of a charged molecule (particle) through a large biological channel under an external voltage. The channel is modeled as a cylinder of three structure parameters: radius, length, and…
In this article we address the three-dimensional modeling and simulation of biological ion channels using a continuum-based approach. Our multi-physics formulation self-consistently combines, to the best of our knowledge for the first time,…
Ion-selective channels play a key role in physiological processes and are used in many technologies. While biological channels can efficiently separate same-charge ions with similar hydration shells, it remains a challenge to mimic such…
Classical molecular dynamics and electro-diffusion theories have achieved profound success in elucidating ion selectivity and gating mechanisms. However, reconciling strict selectivity with high flux permeation in Angstrom-scaled biological…
Ionic transport in nanopores or nanochannels is key to many cellular processes and is now being explored as a method for DNA/polymer sequencing and detection. Although apparently simple in its scope, the study of ionic dynamics in confined…
The effect of fluctuations on the conductivity of ion channels is investigated. It is shown that modulation of the potential barrier at the selectivity site due to electrostatic amplification of charge fluctuations at the channel mouth…