Related papers: Electrodiffusion with calcium-activated potassium …
Potassium ion channels are critical components of biology. They conduct potassium ions across the cell membrane with remarkable speed and selectivity. Understanding how they do this is crucially important for applications in neuroscience,…
The large-conductance, calcium-activated potassium (BK) channel lacks the typical intracellular bundle-crossing gate present in most ion channels of the 6TM family. This observation, initially inferred from Ca$^{2+}$-free-pore accessibility…
A hitherto unexploited characteristic feature of emerging iontronic devices for information processing is the intrinsic mobility of the medium (water) of dissolved ions in aqueous electrolytes, which therefore not only respond to voltage…
The phenomena that emerge from the interaction of the stochastic opening and closing of ion channels (channel noise) with the non-linear neural dynamics are essential to our understanding of the operation of the nervous system. The effects…
Liquid crystalline media mediate interactions between suspended particles and confining geometries, which not only has potential to guide patterning and bottom-up colloidal assembly, but can also control colloidal migration in microfluidic…
Peristalsis enables transport of the food bolus in the gut. Here, I show by dynamic ex-vivo intra-cellular calcium imaging on living embryonic gut transverse sections that the most primitive form of peristalsis that occurs in the embryo is…
Transcranial static magnetic stimulation is a novel noninvasive method of reduction of the cortical excitability in certain neurological diseases that, unlike ordinary transcranial magnetic stimulation, makes use of static magnetic fields…
An intense controversy has surrounded the mechanism of voltage-gating in ion channels. We interpreted the two leading models of voltage-gating with respect to the thermodynamic energetics of membrane insertion of the voltage-sensing…
Potassium channels play critical roles in many physiological processes, providing a selective permeation route for K+ ions in and out of a cell, by employing a carefully designed selectivity filter, evolutionarily conserved from viruses to…
The kinetic analyses are quite important when it comes to understand the particle behavior in any device as they start to deviate from continuum nature. In the present study, kinetic simulations are performed using Particle-in-Cell (PIC)…
We have studied the dynamics of chloride and potassium ions in the interior of the OmpF porin under the influence of an external electric field. From the results of extensive all-atom molecular dynamics simulations of the system we computed…
Transient spine enlargement (3-5 min timescale) is an important event associated with the structural plasticity of dendritic spines. Many of the molecular mechanisms associated with transient spine enlargement have been identified…
It is shown, by means of numerical simulations, that intercellular spiral waves of calcium can be initiated in a network of coupled cells as a result of a de-synchronization between Ca2+ oscillations in two domains. No artificial…
The function of many membrane-enclosed intracellular structures relies on release of diffusing particles that exit through narrow pores or channels in the membrane. The rate of release varies with pore size, density, and length of the…
The non-selective voltage activated cation channel from the human red cells, which is activated at depolarizing potentials, has been shown to exhibit counter-clockwise gating hysteresis. We have analyzed the phenomenon with the simplest…
Excitability is an attribute of life, and is a driving force in the descent of complexity. Cellular electrical activity as realized by membrane proteins that act as either channels or transporters is the basis of excitability. Electrical…
We present a simple one-dimensional trapping model prompted by the problem of ion current across biological membranes. The trap is modeled mimicking the ionic channel membrane behaviour. Such voltage-sensitive channels are open or closed…
The opening rate of voltage-gated potassium ion channels exhibits a characteristic, knee-like turnover where the common exponential voltage-dependence changes suddenly into a linear one. An explanation of this puzzling crossover is put…
Molecular motion through pores plays a crucial role in various natural and industrial processes. One of the most fascinating features of biological channel-facilitated transport is a stochastic gating process, when the channels dynamically…
The physiology of voltage gated ion channels is complex and insights into their gating mechanism is incomplete. Their function is best represented by Markov models with relatively large number of distinct states that are connected by…