  The study of selection and gating in potassium channels is a very important
issue in modern biology. Indeed such structures are known in all types of cells
in all organisms where they play many important functional roles. The mechanism
of gating and selection of ionic species is not clearly understood. In this
paper we study a model in which gating is obtained via an affinity-switching
selectivity filter. We discuss the dependence of selectivity and efficiency on
the cytosolic ionic concentration and on the typical pore open state duration.
We demonstrate that a simple modification of the way in which the selectivity
filter is modeled yields larger channel efficiency.
