Brownian Aging as One of the Mechanistic Components That Shape the Single-Channel Ionic Currents through Biological and Synthetic Membranes

Abstract

Semipermeable membranes enable the separation of a given system from its environment. In biological terms, they are responsible for cells’ identity. In turn, the functioning of ion channels is crucial for the control of ionic fluxes across the membranes and, consequently, for the exchange of chemical and electrical signals. This paper presents a model and simulations of currents through ionic nanochannels in an attempt to better understand the physical mechanism(s) of open/closed (O/C) sequences, i.e., random interruptions of ionic flows through channels observed in all known biochannels and in some synthetic nanopores. We investigate whether aging, i.e., the changes in Brownian motion characteristics with the lapse of time, may be at least one of the sources of the O/C sequences (in addition to the gating machinery in biochannels). The simulations based on the approximated nanostructure of ion channels confirm this postulation. The results also show the possibility of changing the O/C characteristics through an appropriate alteration of the channel surroundings. This observation may be valuable in technical uses of nanochannels in synthetic membranes and allow for a better understanding of the reason for the differences between the biochannels’ activity in diverse biological membranes. Proposals of experimental verification of this aging O/C hypothesis are also presented.