Study of a two-state model for a membrane channel

Abstract

We explore biological transport across membrane channels from a physical point of view. The main objective is to use the tools available to a physicist from non-equilibrium thermodynamics and apply them to a concrete biological problem. In this case, we focus our attention in trying to build simple physical models, yet not trivial, that match the behavior of real channels, or ones that can be synthetically accomplished.

We start with a brief review of the results we obtained for a model with multiplicative noise and proceed to study a dichotomous model, introducing a more realistic description of channel gating, both analytically and numerically. We also introduce a new different simulation framework that allows more flexibility in parameter exploration than the one previously used.