Systematic treatment of solvent properties and mass selectivity

Systematic treatment of solvent properties and mass selectivity 

The reader will already have felt the need for a more systematic approach to the problem of sorting out the solvent and mass selectivity properties of the cell membrane. Such an approach [8,9] starts off with Eqn. 5, which can be rewritten in the form 

The equation in this form cannot be used directly since we do not have experimental values for the partition coefficient of the permeability barrier within the membrane. What we do have for each permeant are values of partition coefficients for various model organic solvents which we want to test as descriptors of the cell membrane barrier, and hence as possible estimates of the K values. In order to test the reasonableness of a particular choice of organic solvent we transform Eqn. 8 into the generalised form 

We can obtain sets of values of P, M and for a particular cell membrane, 

s selectivity of intramembrane diffusion coefficients and solvent validity indices 

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