The voltage dependence and stability of the gating kinetics of the fast Cl-channel in excised patches of membrane from cultured rat skeletal muscle were studied with the patch clamp technique. Up to 10(6) open and shut intervals were analysed from each of five different patches containing a single fast Cl-channel. 2. To test for kinetic stability, plots of the mean durations of consecutive groups of 5-500 open and shut intervals were examined at each voltage. After excluding infrequent entries into both an apparent subconductance state and a long-lived (inactive) shut state, there were no abrupt and sustained changes in the moving means, indicating the absence of obvious shifts to other kinetic modes. The moving means did, however, fluctuate about the overall mean. 3. A comparison of experimental and simulated data indicated that most, but not all, of the fluctuation in the moving means was due to the stochastic variation inherent in the gating process. The fluctuation not accounted for by stochastic variation was mainly expressed as a slow, low-amplitude, component of drift about the mean. This slow component was unlikely to have arisen from measurement errors. 4. To examine whether the slow drift reflected detectable changes in kinetic modes, the data were divided into consecutive groups of 50,000 intervals. The exponential components describing the distributions were remarkably similar among the different groups, with stochastic variation accounting for most of the observed differences. This finding implies a single kinetic mode throughout the experiment. Thus, any changes in channel activity associated with the slow drift would have little effect on the analysis of gating kinetics presented here. 5. Depolarization increased channel open probability, Popen, for all five channels. This increase had a voltage sensitivity of 17 +/- 4 mV per e-fold change (effective gating charge of 1.6 +/- 0.32 electronic charges at 23 degrees C). Popen was 0.5 at -31 +/- 4 mV. 6. The depolarization-induced increase in Popen typically arose from a decrease in the mean shut time (19 +/- 4 mV per e-fold change; effective gating charge of 1.3 +/- 0.3 at 23 degrees C) and an increase in the mean open time (109 +/- 61 mV per e-fold change; effective gating charge of -0.24 +/- 0.13). 7. Neither plots of Popen versus voltage nor plots of the mean open and mean shut time versus voltage were completely described by a single Boltzmann distribution, suggesting multiple voltage-sensitive steps in channel gating.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
