Channels differ with respect to the ion they let pass (for example, Na, K, Cl), the ways in which they may be regulated, the number of subunits of which they are composed and other aspects of structure. Channels belonging to the largest class, which includes the voltage-gated channels that underlie the nerve impulse, consists of four or sometimes five  subunits with six transmembrane helices each. On activation, these helices move about and open the pore. Two of these six helices are separated by a loop that lines the pore and is the primary determinant of ion selectivity and conductance in this channel class and some others. The existence and mechanism for ion selectivity was first postulated in the late 1960s by Bertil Hille and Clay Armstrong. The idea of the ionic selectivity for potassium channels was that the carbonyl oxygens of the protein backbones of the "selectivity filter" (named by Bertil Hille) could efficiently replace the water molecules that normally shield potassium ions, but that sodium ions were smaller and cannot be completely dehydrated to allow such shielding, and therefore could not pass through. This mechanism was finally confirmed when the first structure of an ion channel was elucidated. A bacterial potassium channel KcsA, consisting of just the selectivity filter, "P" loop, and two transmembrane helices was used as a model to study the permeability and the selectivity of ion channels in the Mackinnon lab. The determination of the molecular structure of KcsA by Roderick MacKinnon using X-ray crystallography won a share of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Because of their small size and the difficulty of crystallizing integral membrane proteins for X-ray analysis, it is only very recently that scientists have been able to directly examine what channels "look like." Particularly in cases where the crystallography required removing channels from their membranes with detergent, many researchers regard images that have been obtained as tentative. An example is the long-awaited crystal structure of a voltage-gated potassium channel, which was reported in May 2003. One inevitable ambiguity about these structures relates to the strong evidence that channels change conformation as they operate (they open and close, for example), such that the structure in the crystal could represent any one of these operational states. Most of what researchers have deduced about channel operation so far they have established through electrophysiology, biochemistry, gene sequence comparison and mutagenesis.
Channels can have single (CLICs) to multiple transmembrane (K channels, P2X receptors, Na channels) domains which span plasma membrane to form pores. Pore can determine the selectivity of the channel. Gate can be formed either inside or outside the pore region.