Natural ion pumps are able to conduct ions across cell membranes to maintain membrane resting potential and to regulate the action potential in electrically excitable cells.&lt;span style="font-size:10.8333px"&gt; &lt;/span&gt;Looking beyond the structural of the natural ion pumps, it is possible to envision that synthetic molecules would also act of similar functions. We have demonstrated that unimolecular tubular structures was an ideal backbone for the construction of artificial channels to achieve the complicate transport process. In this talk, I will show our recent result on the construction of artificial channels that can pump ion against concentration gradient by using the unimolecular peptide channels. The new unimolecular channels are zwitterion, which inserted into a lipid bilayer in an unsymmetric manner. This alignment bias led to directional K<sup>+</sup> transport and can pump K<sup>+</sup> across the bilayers without any driving force.

Pumping potassium against concentration gradient through unimolecular channel

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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