Selectivity filter conductance, rectification and fluctuations of subdomains—How can this all relate to the value of Hurst exponent in the dwell-times of ion channels states?

The Hurst effect in the signals describing ion channels’ activity has been known for many years. This effect is present in the experimental recordings of single-channel currents, but not only. The sequences of dwell times of functionally different channel states also exhibit long-range correlations. We have found that the memory effect within the dwell-time series is related to the coupling between the channel’s activation gate (AG) and selectivity filter (SF), which controls the ion conduction. In this work, we analyzed both the experimental data describing the activity of potassium channels of different types (e.g., BK, mitoBK, mitoTASK-3, mitoKv1.3, TREK-2-like channels) and the series generated according to our previously proposed Hurst effect model. The obtained results suggest that the strength of the allosteric cooperation between the AG and SF determines not only the conductance of the channel – which governs how often ions in SF move or remain blocked – but also modulates the correlations present in the dwell times when sampled with a suitably high sampling rate. Moreover, we found that rectification can interfere with this process, contributing to additional changes in correlations within the channel’s sojourns in subsequent states. Similarly, the correlations may be affected by processes proceeding at longer time scales, like interactions with the channel’s auxiliary domains or lipid surroundings.