New Approach for Currents Assessment in Single Ion Channels of Cardiac Cells Nuclei

The most common method of investigation of bioelectric processes in ion channels involves statistical analysis of the measured amplitudes of currents during open and closed periods of channels by means of histograms. However, information on channel switching time or event origin is lost. The goal of this paper is to improve the assessment of ion functional properties using the signal processing methods, based on wavelet analysis of single channel recordings. To assess functioning of large-conductance cation channels (LCC-channels) the electrophysiological technologies on the base of experimental equipment with patch-clamp technique are used. Numerical experiments of signal processing demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach, which is based on feature extraction of the currents of single channels in the time-sliding window. The proposed method allows for interpretation of experimental studying of functional properties of single channels without loss of temporal information. Wavelet decomposition is used to obtain undistorted morphologies of recordings. The proposed integral features, based on wavelet decomposition, allow us to estimate channel functioning under the influence of various drugs and can be used for classification of channel blocking mechanisms.