A quantitative description of the Na-K-2Cl cotransporter and its conformity to experimental data

Abstract

In epithelia, the Na-K-2Cl cotransporter cooperates with other transport mechanisms to produce transepithelial NaCl transport. The reaction cycle for the Na-K-2Cl cotransporter has been established experimentally, but whether it accounts, quantitatively, for experimental findings has yet to be established. The differential equations that describe the reaction cycle were formulated, and the steady-state solutions were obtained by digital computation. Conformity between this description and the experimental data obtained from the literature was explored by automatic searches for the sets of rate constants that yielded statistical best-fits to the experimental data. Fits were obtained from renal epithelial cell lines, HeLa cells, and duck erythrocytes. Results show that the reaction cycle for the Na-K-2Cl cotransporter conforms well, quantitatively, with the experimental data.