And this is so effective and so efficient that 1 million of these water molecules move along this channel every single second. Now, what about these positive charges? So basically, as a result of the presence of these positive charges at the center of that passageway, ions, for instance, hydronium ions or protons, will not be able to make their way across this channel. And that's important because if these channels somehow were able to actually allow the movement of H plus ions, what that would do is it would disrupt the hydrogen ion gradients within our cells. And those gradients are important because as we'll see in a future lecture, we use these proton gradients to actually create ATP molecules. So we see that ions such as H plus ions will not be able to pass across due to the presence of the positive charges in that passageway at the center of that passageway, as shown here.