The activation of voltage-dependent ion channels is associated with the movement of gating charges, which give rise to gating currents. Although gating currents from a single channel are too small to be detected, analysis of the fluctuations of macroscopic gating currents from a population of channels allows a good guess of their magnitude. The analysis of experimental gating current fluctuations, when interpreted in terms of a rate model of channel activation and assuming sufficiently high bandwidth, is in accordance with the presence of a main step along the activation pathway carrying a charge of 2.3–2.4 e0. To give a physical interpretation to these results and to relate them to the known atomic structure of the voltage sensor domain, we used a Brownian model of voltage-dependent gating based on atomic detail structure, that follows the laws of electrodynamics. The model predicts gating currents and gating current fluctuations essentially similar to those experimentally observed. The detailed study of the model output, also performed by making several simplifications aimed at understanding the basic dependencies of the gating current fluctuations, suggests that in real channels the voltage sensor moves along a sequence of intermediate states separated by relatively low (<5 kT) energy barriers. As a consequence, crossings of successive gating charges through the gating pore become very frequent, and the corresponding current shots are often seen to overlap because of the relatively high filtering. Notably, this limited bandwidth effect is at the origin of the relatively high single-step charge experimentally detected.
