IR Spectroscopy Can Reveal the Mechanism of K+ Transport in Ion Channels (Biophysical Journal)

Ion channels like KcsA enable ions to move across cell membranes at near diffusion-limited rates and with very high selectivity. Various mechanisms have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. Broadly, there is disagreement among the proposed mechanisms about whether ions occupy adjacent sites in the channel during the transport process. Here, using a mixed quantum-classical approach to calculate theoretical infrared spectra, we propose a set of infrared spectroscopy experiments that can discriminate between mechanisms with and without adjacent ions.