Related papers: Hydration Mimicry by Membrane Ion Channels

Understanding how different classes of molecules move across biological membranes is a prerequisite to predicting a solute's permeation rate, which is a critical factor in the fields of drug design and pharmacology. We use biased Molecular…

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…

Hydroxide ion transport and structure in aqueous media is fundamental to many chemical and biological processes. Research on hydroxide behavior has primarily focused on a single fully solvated hydroxide, either as an isolated cluster or in…

Unassisted ion transport through lipid membranes plays a crucial role in many cell functions without which life would not be possible, yet the precise mechanism behind the process remains unknown due to its molecular complexity. Here, we…

Ion dehydration has been hypothesized to strongly influence separation performance in membrane systems and ion transport in nanoscale channels. However, the molecular details of ion dehydration in membranes are not well understood, in…

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…

In aqueous solutions, dissolved ions interact strongly with the surrounding water, thereby modifying the solution properties in an ion-specific manner. These ion-hydration interactions can be accounted for theoretically on a mean-field…

The mobility of water molecules confined in a silica pore is studied by computer simulation in the low hydration regime, where most of the molecules reside close to the hydrophilic substrate. A layer analysis of the single particle dynamics…

Synthetic lipid membranes in the absence of proteins can display quantized conduction events for ions that are virtually indistinguishable from those of protein channel. By indistinguishable we mean that one cannot decide based on the…

By performing molecular dynamics simulations with up to 132 million coarse-grained particles in half-micron sized boxes, we show that hydrodynamics quantitatively explains the finite-size effects on diffusion of lipids, proteins, and carbon…

Water is essential for the activity of proteins. However, the effect of the properties of water on the behavior of proteins is only partially understood. Recently, several experiments have investigated the relation between the dynamics of…

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…

It is well known that at the gel-liquid phase transition temperature a lipid bilayer membrane exhibits an increased ion permeability. We analyze the quantized currents in which the increased permeability presents itself. The open time…

Interfaces between aqueous electrolytes and nanoporous carbons are involved in a number of technological applications such as energy storage and capacitive deionization. The disordered nature of the carbon materials makes it challenging to…

The process of protons transport in molecular water chains is of fundamental interest for many biological systems. Although many features of such systems can be analyzed using large-scale computational modeling, other features are better…

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…

Ion channels are protein structures that facilitate the selective passage of ions across the membrane cells of living organisms. They are known for their high conductance and high selectivity. The precise mechanism between these two…

We showed that quantum mechanical superposition can sustain in the process of ion transfer in protein membrane for a substantial period, in spite of the presence of the interactions with environmental modes of molecular vibration. The…

Transport of water through ion-exchange membranes is of importance both for electrodialysis (ED) and reverse electrodialysis (RED). In this work, we extend our previous theory [J. Membrane Sci., 510, (2016) 370-381] and include water…

Polymer association at liquid-liquid interfaces is a promising way to spontaneously obtain soft self-healing membranes. In the case of reversible bonding between two polymers, the macromolecules are mobile everywhere within the membrane and…