Quantification of Water Flux in Vesicular Systems

Water transport across lipid membranes is fundamental to all forms of life and plays a major role in health and disease. However, not only typical water facilitators like aquaporins facilitate water flux, but also transporters, ion channels or receptors represent potent water pathways. The efforts directed towards a mechanistic understanding of water conductivity determinants in transmembrane proteins, the development of water flow inhibitors, and the creation of biomimetic membranes with incorporated membrane proteins or artificial water channels depend on reliable and accurate ways of quantifying water permeabilities P(f). A conventional method is to subject vesicles to an osmotic gradient in a stopped-flow device: Fast recordings of scattered light intensity are converted into the time course of vesicle volume change. Even though an analytical solution accurately acquiring P(f) from scattered light intensities exists, approximations potentially misjudging P(f) by orders of magnitude are used. By means of computational and experimental data we point out that erroneous results such as that the single channel water permeability p(f) depends on the osmotic gradient are direct results of such approximations. Finally, we propose an empirical solution of which calculated permeability values closely match those calculated with the analytical solution in the relevant range of parameters.