Voltage distribution across nerve membranes

Abstract

EXPERIMENTS on nerve membranes and model systems (such as black lipid films modified by excitability-inducing material) often show conductance parameters which seem to be closely related to Maxwell–Boltzmann statistics¹. There are, however, some difficulties when trying to fit simple Maxwell–Boltzmann factors to experiments. One often has to introduce an effective charge that is not an integer times the electronic charge and often the effective charge changes with voltage. We show here that the effective charge and its nonlinearity may be a consequence of the voltage distribution across the membrane. This implies that the so-called gating particles² may be univalent charges—for example, electrons (I.L. and M.S., unpublished).