| Abstract: |
| We talk about the joint work with Bob Eisenberg (Rush Medical Center) and Weishi Liu (University of Kansas). In this work, we investigate Ussing`s unidirectional fluxes and flux ratios of charged tracers motivated particularly by the insightful proposal of Hodgkin and Keynes on a relation between flux ratios and channel structure. Our study is based on analysis of quasi-one-dimensional Poisson-Nernst-Planck type models for ionic flows through membrane channels. We focus on two treatments of tracer flux measurements that serve as estimators of important properties of ion channels. The first estimator determines the flux of the main ion species from measurements of the flux of its tracer. The second treatment of tracer fluxes concerns ratios of fluxes and experimental setups that try to determine some properties of channel structure. This work is a first step showing how measurements of fluxes and flux ratios can give important insights into channel structure and function. |
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