Resonant effects in a voltage-activated channel gating

Abstract

The non-selective voltage activated cation channel from the human red cells, which is activated at depolarizing potentials, has been shown to exhibit counter-clockwise gating hysteresis. We have analyzed the phenomenon with the simplest possible phenomenological models by assuming $2\times 2$ discrete states, i.e. two normal open/closed states with two different states of ``gate tension.'' Rates of transitions between the two branches of the hysteresis curve have been modeled with single-barrier kinetics by introducing a real-valued ``reaction coordinate'' parameterizing the protein's conformational change. When described in terms of the effective potential with cyclic variations of the control parameter (an activating voltage), this model exhibits typical ``resonant effects'': synchronization, resonant activation and stochastic resonance. Occurrence of the phenomena is investigated by running the stochastic dynamics of the model and analyzing statistical properties of gating trajectories.