Abstract
Study on excitation phenomena in model systems are interesting as a counter part of investigations on living tissue. The occurrence of excitation in various kinds of synthetic membrane systems has been reported since the last 40 years. Recently we found that a polypeptide membrane spontaneously generated electrical pulses under a concentration gradient of salt in the absence of any other external forces.In this article, we describe the excitable membrane accompanying a conformational change prepared from synthetic polypeptide, and discuss the relation between the excitation phenomena and the conformational transition and also membrane structure.
