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The Significance of Membrane Transport

The Significance of Membrane Transport

The transport of solutes across the cell membrane is essential for metabolic processes, like maintaining cell size and volume, generating the action potential, exchanging nutrients and gases, etc. Membrane transport can be either passive or active. It can be simple diffusion, facilitated, or mediated transport aided by transport proteins such as transporters and channels.
Transporters facilitate either an active or passive movement of solutes. They can allow a single-molecule transport down its...

Transport Number

Transport Number

The transport number is the fraction of the total current carried by an ion in an electrolyte solution. It is defined as the ratio of the current carried by a specific ion to the total current flowing through the solution. The transport number, t, is central to understanding ionic mobility, which describes how fast an ion moves under the influence of an electric field. This link connects the physical behavior of ions in solution to the chemical processes that occur during electrochemical...

Primary Active Transport

Primary Active Transport

In contrast to passive transport, active transport involves a substance being moved through membranes in a direction against its concentration or electrochemical gradient. There are two types of active transport: primary active transport and secondary active transport. Primary active transport utilizes chemical energy from ATP to drive protein pumps embedded in the cell membrane. With energy from ATP, the pumps transport ions against their electrochemical gradients—a direction they would not...

Secondary Active Transport

Secondary Active Transport

One example of how cells use the energy contained in electrochemical gradients is demonstrated by glucose transport into cells. The ion vital to this process is sodium (Na+), which is typically present in higher concentrations extracellularly than in the cytosol. Such a concentration difference is due, in part, to the action of an enzyme "pump" embedded in the cellular membrane that actively expels Na+ from a cell. Importantly, as this pump contributes to the high concentration of...

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Facilitated Diffusion

The plasma membrane, a critical structure in cellular biology, houses an array of transporters, or carrier proteins, interspersed within its lipid bilayer. These proteins play a crucial role in solute transport through facilitated diffusion, a form of passive diffusion that uses transporters to move the molecules across the membrane.
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Passive diffusion is a critical process that allows small lipophilic drugs to cross the cell membrane along a concentration gradient. This mechanism's efficiency depends on four primary factors: the membrane's surface area, the drug's lipid-water partition coefficient, the concentration gradient, and the membrane's thickness.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 14, 2026

Single-Molecule Imaging of Nuclear Transport

Single-Molecule Imaging of Nuclear Transport

Published on: June 9, 2010

Statistical approach to investigating transport through single molecules.

Emanuel Lörtscher¹, Heiko B Weber, Heike Riel

¹IBM Research GmbH, 8803 Rüschlikon, Switzerland.

Physical Review Letters

|May 16, 2007

Summary

This study introduces a statistical method to analyze molecular junction transport characteristics by combining current-voltage data with controlled manipulation. The approach accurately determines the most probable transport properties, even for subnanometer molecules.

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Area of Science:

Molecular electronics
Statistical analysis
Quantum transport

Background:

Understanding electron transport through molecular junctions is crucial for molecular electronics.
Accurate characterization of transport properties is challenging due to inherent variability.

Purpose of the Study:

To develop and validate a statistical approach for determining the most probable transport characteristics of molecular junctions.
To demonstrate the sensitivity of the method for subnanometer-scale molecules.

Main Methods:

Acquisition of comprehensive current-voltage (I-V) data during controlled manipulation of molecular junctions.
Application of statistical analysis to the acquired I-V data to identify probable transport characteristics.

Main Results:

The statistical approach successfully determined the most probable transport characteristics.
The method demonstrated excellent sensitivity to subnanometer-long molecules, including benzene-1,4-dithiol and a terphenyl derivative.

Conclusions:

The presented statistical method offers a robust and sensitive tool for characterizing electron transport in molecular junctions.
This approach facilitates the reliable determination of molecular-scale electronic properties.