Short and long-range correlations in single-channel currents from inwardly rectifying K[formula omitted] channels

Abstract

Ion channels mediate the transport of ions through the cell membrane and are involved in key processes such as muscle contraction, nerve excitability and hormone secretion. For decades, the main focus of the standard techniques for the analysis and modeling of single-channel currents has been to characterize the gating of ionic channels by analyzing the current amplitudes and dwell-time histograms, thus neglecting the possibility that pore fluctuations (open and closed), usually considered to be stochastic noise, might contain valuable information about the functional aspects of ion channels. Based on the analysis of a deterministic model indicating that the stochastic gating of ion channels could be produced by correlated pore fluctuations, in this work, we analyzed experimental recordings of single channel currents of an inwardly rectifying K+ channel in order to demonstrate the presence of both short and long range correlations in the open and closed pore fluctuations