Estimation of Ion Channel Kinetics from Fluctuations of Macroscopic Currents

ABSTRACT

For single channel recordings, the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of kinetic rates and conductance is well established. A direct extrapolation of this method to macroscopic currents is computationally prohibitive: it scales as a power of the number of channels. An approximated MLE that ignored the local time correlation of the data has been shown to provide estimates of the kinetic parameters. In this article, an improved approximated MLE that takes into account the local time correlation is proposed. This method estimates the channel kinetics using both the time course and the random fluctuations of the macroscopic current generated by a homogeneous population of ion …