Related papers: Ions in Fluctuating Channels: Transistors Alive
The permeation, rejection, and transport of electrolytes in water-filled nanopores are critical to ion current gating and desalinalion processes in synthetic porous membranes and the functions of biological ion channels. Mile the effects of…
Voltage-dependent ion channels determine the electric properties of axonal cell membranes. They not only allow the passage of ions through the cell membrane but also contribute to an additional charging of the cell membrane resulting in the…
Transport of molecules across membrane channels is investigated theoretically using exactly solvable discrete stochastic site-binding models. It is shown that the interaction potential between molecules and the channel has a strong effect…
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…
The brain's remarkable and efficient information processing capability is driving research into brain-inspired (neuromorphic) computing paradigms. Artificial aqueous ion channels are emerging as an exciting platform for neuromorphic…
Virtually all cells use energy and ion-specific membrane pumps to maintain large transmembrane gradients of Na$^+$, K$^+$, Cl$^-$, Mg$^{++}$, and Ca$^{++}$. Although they consume up to 1/3 of a cell's energy budget, the corresponding…
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…
Bacteria meticulously regulate their intracellular ion concentrations and create ionic concentration gradients across the bacterial membrane. These ionic concentration gradients provide free energy for many cellular processes and are…
The molecular mechanism of ion channel gating and substrate modulation is elusive for many voltage gated ion channels, such as eukaryotic sodium ones. The understanding of channel functions is a pressing issue in molecular biophysics and…
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…
We performed all-atom molecular dynamics simulations studying the partition of ions and the ionic current through the bacterial porin OmpF and two selected mutants. The study is motivated by new interesting experimental findings concerning…
We study the non-equilibrium dynamics of lipid membranes with proteins that actively pump ions across the membrane. We find that the activity leads to a fluctuating force distribution due to electrostatic interactions arising from variation…
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…
We demonstrate that two mechanisms used by biological ion channels to select particles by size are driven by entropy. With uncharged particles in an infinite cylinder, we show that a channel that attracts particles is small-particle…
Ion channels are important proteins for physiological information transfer and functional control. To predict the microscopic origins of their voltage-conductance characteristics, we here applied dissipation-corrected targeted Molecular…
The paper shows how the diffusive movement of ions through a channel protein can be described as a chemical reaction over an arbitrary shaped potential barrier. The result is simple and intuitive but without approximation beyond the…
Ion transport measurements are widely used as an indirect probe for various properties of confined electrolytes. It is generally assumed that the ion concentration in a nanoscale channel is equal to the ion concentration in the macroscopic…
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…
Ionic Coulomb blockade is one of the mesoscopic effects in ion transport revealing the quantized nature of ionic charges, which is of crucial importance to our understanding of the sub-continuum transport in nanofluidics and the mechanism…
We propose and study a model of hypothetical magnetosensitive ionic channels which are long thought to be a possible candidate to explain the influence of weak magnetic fields on living organisms ranging from magnetotactic bacteria to…