Fig. 6: Ion dwell time and density in the pore.

a Distribution of dwell times for Na⁺ (red) and K⁺ (blue) ions traversing the pore at various transmembrane voltages, with vertical lines indicating the means of the respective dwell times. b Average number of Na⁺ (red) and K⁺ (blue) in the SF and pore at different voltages. Simulations were performed with the pore domain and VSD. A statistical t test was performed from five independent simulation runs, and p values were calculated to assess the significance of the difference of K⁺ and Na⁺ ion number. [The exact p values: SF, –200 mV: 0.0564; –100 mV: 0.0487; +100 mV: 0.1140; +200 mV: 0.0006. Pore, –200 mV: 0.0026; –100 mV: 0.0083; +100 mV: 0.0020; +200 mV: 0.0020. Not significant (ns): p > 0.05; significant (*): p ≤ 0.05; very significant (**): p ≤ 0.01; highly significant (***): p ≤ 0.001]. All the error bars represent the standard deviation of the mean.