A Mathematical Model for Voltage Gated Ion-channel Stationary Conductance

Opening of ion-channels has been popularly described by means of Markov processes with a small number of important channel states. The approximation of the number of important states is often ambiguous and overestimating this number creates unnecessary computational complexities. We propose a simple equation that will portray the essence of voltage regulated ion-channel gating in a functional cell. The equation is generated using concepts in elementary thermodynamics applied to protein Markov models and it matches well many published channel current-voltage characteristics. Further, parameters of the model are found to be identifiable and easily determined from experimental data.