Self-organized critical gating of ion channels: on the origin of long-term memory in dwell time series.

We present the model of an ion channel, operating in a regime of self-organized criticality. It is suggested that complex cooperative dynamics takes place in the protein and the overall tension of it facilitates an open or closed state of the rigid gates in the pore-making domain. For the first time multifractal spectra of ion channel dynamics are presented. Our model well reproduces the multifractal properties of ion channel dwell time series and provides an insight on the origin of the long-term correlations in these series.