Piezo-electric coupling of membrane proteins

A membrane protein responds to pressure perturbation if the molar volume of its various conformational states has different values, or if these states have different contact areas with the lipid bilayer. An oscillating pressure can then drive the protein to oscillate among its various conformational states within the catalytic cycle. It is shown that this property of an ion transporter enables it to absorb energy from the pressure wave to actively pump an ion against its concentration gradient, thus converting the pressure energy into the electrochemical potential energy of an ion, and vice versa. An electroformational coupling model developed earlier is applied to formulate an efficient piezoelectric transducer. With reasonable assumptions on the cell membrane parameters, the model can easily generate a membrane potential on the order of 100 mV.