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Zuodong Sun Writes Again to MacKinnon: From Hinge Misconceptions to Windmill Rotation, the Truth Behind Potassium Channel Gating Demands Authoritative Dialogue

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2026-04-18

On April 18, 2026, Chinese researcher Dr. Zuodong Sun released an open letter to Professor Roderick MacKinnon, the 2003 Nobel laureate in Chemistry, titled Further Inquiry to Professor MacKinnon: Scientific Discussions on the Potassium Channel Model. Drawing on the latest theoretical reviews and experimental advances, this letter systematically addresses the explanatory limitations of traditional ion channel gating models and proposes the tetrameric cooperative rotation mechanism as a more consistent physical picture.

Approximately one month prior, Zuodong Sun had written to Professor MacKinnon regarding the DNA origami windmill tetramer model, without receiving a response.

In October 2019, Zuodong Sun published The “Origami Windmill” Model of Potassium Channels in the Journal of US-China Medical Science, putting forward for the first time that ion channels achieve gating through tetrameric cooperative rotation. This work presents systematic alternative insights to the selectivity filter model and paddle model within the MacKinnon framework. The findings have been officially included in authoritative platforms such as Science Popularization in China and Baidu Encyclopedia.

In his recently published article The Gate of Ion Channels Is Not a Gate, Zuodong Sun argues from the perspectives of engineering reliability and physical dynamics: gating models based on local bending (e.g., hinges, levers) raise theoretical concerns about structural stability under high-frequency and long-term operation, whereas the tetrameric cooperative rotation mechanism better matches the high robustness exhibited by ion channels in biological activities.

The open letter systematically reviews the academic lineage of the MacKinnon team: the static structure of the potassium channel selectivity filter was revealed in Science in 1998, recognized by the Nobel Prize, yet left the gating mechanism unsolved. Between 2003 and 2005, the MacKinnon team published a series of papers in Nature and Science, gradually developing and refining the paddle model, hinge, lever, and spring-coupling mechanisms in an attempt to fill the explanatory gap. The latest experiments in May 2025 have confirmed the cooperative motion of four subunits, highly consistent with the predictions of the windmill model, while theoretical interpretations still adhere to the two-decade-old paradigm.

In the letter, Zuodong Sun emphasizes that the most concise and self-consistent physical picture of four-subunit cooperative motion is the global cooperative rotation of the tetramer, rather than a superposition of multiple local bending mechanisms. The reliability of traditional hinge/lever models under long-term, high-frequency working conditions remains to be verified.

The open letter is rigorously phrased, well-documented, and clearly chronological, representing both an academic inquiry and a practice of the scientific spirit of seeking truth. As of the present, Professor MacKinnon’s team has not responded to the earlier academic communication. A paradigm shift in the ion channel field awaits an authoritative dialogue that confronts the facts.

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