Differential tunnel-opening patterns were established in static structures of mammalian CYP450 isoforms and subsequently applied to identify tunnel-intersecting residues. The identified tunnel-intersecting residues permitted the subsequent construction of gating models via the identification of intra-protein interactions. We define 28 two-state gating models and 37 singlet gating-residue models. Our results reveal the preponderance of aromatic gating residues in CYP3A4 and CYP2A6, whereas we find a preponderance of polar/charged residues in CYP2C5. In CYP2C8 there is balanced presence of polar/charged and hydrophobic aliphatic residues in gating models, whilst in CYP2C9 there is balanced presence of all residue-types. These patterns suggest fast evolutionary dynamics for gating residues and we find that the average rate of evolution of gating residues in CYP2C5, CYP2C8, CYP2C9 and CYP2A6 is significantly faster than the average rate of evolution of the entire sequence. Our study identifies 67% of calculable gating models identified in the literature by molecular dynamics approaches and 92% of residues appearing in literature models appear in our models. However, only 6% of the models identified in this work had been previously-described in the literature. This suggests that our study has defined the most comprehensive list yet of tunnel-gating models in mammalian CYP450 and in doing so have created a benchmark for molecular dynamics approaches to the ligand-tunnelling problem in CYP450. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.