In retrospect, noise analysis of membrane ion currents played a crucial role in verifying the existence of protein ion channels – key membrane-bound structures that allow cells to sense ligands, maintain homeostasis, and communicate with each other. Nowadays, with the development of channel reconstitution techniques, noise, and more generally, fluctuation analyses are opening new possibilities. They allow one to study the kinetic and transport properties of channel-forming peptides and proteins at the single-molecular level. Related references

The microscopic world is noisy. At the molecular level, processes studied by physics and biology alike are intrinsically random. Keeping this in mind, we use theoretical and experimental methods of information analysis to explore voltage-dependent ion channels from the point of view of signal transfer in the presence of random noise. Basic ideas of the constructive role of noise in signal processing (“stochastic resonance”) and of noise as a limitation of system’s performance are applied to problems of sensory biology. Related reference