Eisenberg R.S. – TechConnect Briefs

Integrated Techniques for Transmembrane Protein Sensing

Eisenberg R.S., Goodnick S.M., Goryll M., Petrossian L., Tang J.M., Thornton T.J., Wilk S.J., Arizona State University, US

We present a method for the microfabrication of apertures in a silicon substrate using well-known cleanroom technologies and a novel approach using phase sensitive detection to measure single channels of transmembrane proteins. These proteins are [...]

Microfabricated Silicon Apertures for Ion Channel Measurement

Eisenberg R.S., Goodnick S.M., Goryll M., Laws G.M., Petrossian L., Saraniti M., Tang J.M., Thornton T.J., Wilk S.J., Arizona State University, US

Ion channels are proteins that act as pores in cell membranes and allow only specific ions to pass through the cell wall. Here, we present a method for microfabrication of apertures in a silicon substrate [...]

Brownian Dynamics Simulation of Transport Properties in Potassium Ion Channels

Aboud S., Eisenberg R.S., Marreiro D., Saraniti M., IIT/Rush University, US

In this work, a Brownian dynamics simulator based on the self-consistent coupling of the Langevin equation with a field solver, is used to model the ionic transport. Within this approach, the molecular structure of both [...]

The Dielectric Boundary Force in Ion Channels: The Case of Gramicidin

Eisenberg R.S., Hollerbach U., Nadler B., Yale University, US

In an electrostatic problem with different dielectric regions, a charge in one region induces surface charges at all dielectric boundaries, which, in turn, exert an often neglected force on the charge that induced them. This [...]

Equilibrium Structure of Electrolyte calculated using Equilibrium Monte Carlo, Molecular Dynamics, and Boltzmann Transport Monte Carlo Simulations

Boda D., Chen D.P., Eisenberg R.S., Henderson D., Kathawala G., Kuang Z., Ravaioli U., van der Straaten T.A., University of Illinois, US

We use the pair correlation function as a benchmark calculation to compare three simulation methodologies -Equilibrium Monte Carlo, Molecular Dynamics, and Boltzmann Transport Monte Carlo. The three simulation approaches handle electrostatic boundary conditions and ion-water [...]

Self-Consistent Particle-Based Simulations of Three-Dimensional Ionic Solutions

Eisenberg R.S., Saraniti M., Wigger-Aboud S., Rush University and IIT, US

Ion channels are an important class of proteins responsible for controlling the ion flux into and out of cells, and are interesting in the electronics community for their possible application for new classes of electronics [...]

Ionic Diffusion Through Protein Channels: From molecular description to continuum equations

Eisenberg R.S., Nadler B., Schuss Z., Singer A., Yale University, US

Diffusion of particles through a microscopic region, as in ionic permeation through protein channels, is an important phenomenon in many diverse fields. Permeation through ion channels occurs on a microsecond time scale, far longer than [...]

Crowded Charge in Biological Ion Channels

Eisenberg R.S., Gillespie D., Nonner W., Univ. of Miami School of Medicine, US

Biological ion channels are devices very much like FETs, but conduct ions with chemical properties that are usually described by quantum mechanics (that is, delocalization of electrons between ion and channel protein). In the last [...]

Structure-function study of Porins

Chen D.P., Eisenberg R.S., Tang J., Rush Medical College, US

Single channel current-voltage (IV) relations were measured from proteins that form channels across the outer membranes of Gram-negative bacteria-porins and their mutants in solutions of KCl. The wild-type porins and some of their specific mutants [...]

Combining Computational Chemistry and Computational Electronics to Understand Protein Ion Channels

Aluru N.R., Chiu S-W, Eisenberg R.S., Jakobsson E., Ravaioli U., Tang J., van der Straaten T., Varma S., University of Illinois, US

Nanoscale computational engineering can be achieved by combining atomic and molecular scale methods of computational chemistry with coarser-grained continuum theories used in computational electronics. Each computational discipline is quite different; yet both must give the [...]