National Center for Design of
Biomimetic Nanoconductors

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Equivalent circuit of an ion channel superimposed on a visualization of the potassium channel pore lumen in the closed (gray outline) and open (orange outline) state.  The emf source is in the selectivity filter and the variable resistance is in the part of the channel that changes diameter on gating.  This visualization illustrates the correspondence between the engineering and the biological representations of the channel protein.  It represents three Nobel Prizes: To Hodgkin and Huxley for the equivalent circuit description of electrically excitable membranes, to Neher and Sakmann for measuring the current corresponding to excitability through individual protein channels, and to MacKinnon for determining the protein structure.

The National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors is funded by Grant Number PHS 2 PN2 EY016570B from the National Institutes of Health through the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research and is based at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Partner institutions include University of Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, Sandia National Laboratories, Wabash College, University of California, Davis, and the University of New Mexico, University of Illinois at Chicago, Weill Cornell Medical College, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.