Ion-channel-like behavior in lipid bilayer membranes at the melting transition

Abstract

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 histogram shows a "-3/2" power law which implies an open-closed transition rate that decreases like $k(t)\propto t^{-1}$ as time evolves. We propose a "pore freezing" model to explain the observations. We discuss how this model also leads to the $1/f^{\alpha }$ noise that is commonly observed in currents across biological and artificial membranes.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• The temperature dependence of lipid membrane permeability, its quantized nature, and the influence of anesthetics
• The thermodynamics of general anesthesia
• Fractional diffusion modeling of ion channel gating