Effect of stochastic gating on the flux through a membrane channel: a steady-state approach

Abstract

This paper deals with the effect of stochastic gating on the flux of solute molecules through a membrane channel. According to the conventional approach, this flux is given by the product of the flux through the open channel and the probability of finding the channel in the open state. Recently we derived an expression for the flux through a stochastically gated channel (Berezhkovskii and Bezrukov 2017 J. Chem. Phys. 147 084109) that showed that the conventional approach may underestimate the flux at fast gating by orders of magnitude. The present work proposes a novel approach to the problem: while our initial derivation of the expression for the flux focuses on the molecule propagator in the channel, here we treat the problem by considering the steady-state flux through an ensemble of identical stochastically gated channels. We show now that the effect of gating on the flux is independent of the gate position, i.e. whether the gate is located at the channel entrance or exit.