Related papers: Ions in Fluctuating Channels: Transistors Alive
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…
A quantum wire is spatially displaced by suitable electric fields with respect to the scatterers inside a semiconductor crystal. As a function of the wire position, the low-temperature resistance shows reproducible fluctuations. Their…
Deciphering ion channel activity and signaling interactions within cells is one of the key tasks of neuroscience. Currently, measuring this electrophysiological activity is done using patch-clamp1-4 or voltage-sensitive imaging5-8.…
The opening or closing mechanism of a voltage-gated ion channel is triggered by the potential difference crossing the cell membrane in the nervous system. Based on this picture, we model the ion channel as a nanoscale two-terminal ionic…
Elastic confinements are an important component of many biological systems and dictate the transport properties of suspended particles under flow. In this chapter, we review the Brownian motion of a particle moving in the vicinity of a…
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…
Nuclear pore complexes are constantly confronted by large fluxes of macromolecules and macromolecular complexes that need to get into and out of the nucleus. Such bi-directional traffic occurring in a narrow channel can easily lead to…
We perform computational investigations of electrolyte-mediated interactions of charged colloidal particles confined within nanochannels. We investigate the role of discrete ion effects, valence, and electrolyte strength on colloid-wall…
Ion transport in biological and synthetic nanochannels is characterized by phenomena such as ion current fluctuations and rectification. Recently, it has been demonstrated that nanofabricated synthetic pores can mimic transport properties…
One of the most celebrated successes in computational biology is the Hodgkin-Huxley framework for modeling electrically active cells. This framework, expressed through a set of differential equations, synthesizes the impact of ionic…
{\it De novo} protein sequencing is essential for understanding cellular processes that govern the function of living organisms and all post-translational events and other sequence modifications that occur after a protein has been…
We study charge transport in an ionic solution in a confined nanoscale geometry in the presence of an externally applied electric field and immobile background charges. For a range of parameters, the ion current shows non-monotonic behavior…
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…
Ion transport in biological and synthetic nanochannels is characterized by such phenomena as ion current fluctuations, rectification, and pumping. Recently, it has been shown that the nanofabricated synthetic pores could be considered as…
The free energy of inserting a protein into a membrane is determined by considering the variation in the spectrum of thermal fluctuations in response to the presence of a rigid inclusion. Both numerically and through a simple analytical…
The transport of fluids at the nanoscale is fundamental to manifold biological and industrial processes, ranging from neurotransmission to ultrafiltration. Yet, it is only recently that well-controlled channels with cross-sections as small…
The classical continuum theories fail to describe the ionic transport in Angstrom channels, where conduction deviates from Ohm's law, as attributed to dehydration/self-energy barrier and dissociation of Bjerrum ion-pairs in previous work.…
Active contributions to fluctuations are a direct consequence of metabolic energy consumption in living cells. Such metabolic processes continuously create active forces, which deform the membrane to control motility, proliferation as well…
The charge states of ions in dense plasmas fluctuate due to collisional ionization and recombination. Here we show how, by modifying the ion interaction potential, these fluctuations can mediate energy exchange between the plasma electrons…
Dielectric microstructures have been reported to have negative influences on perm-selective ion transportation because ions do not migrate in areas where the structures are located. However, the structure can promote the transportation if…