English

Co-transport-induced instability of membrane voltage in tip-growing cells

Quantitative Methods 2009-11-11 v1

Abstract

A salient feature of stationary patterns in tip-growing cells is the key role played by the symports and antiports, membrane proteins that translocate two ionic species at the same time. It is shown that these co-transporters destabilize generically the membrane voltage if the two translocated ions diffuse differently and carry a charge of opposite (same) sign for symports (antiports). Orders of magnitude obtained for the time and lengthscale are in agreement with experiments. A weakly nonlinear analysis characterizes the bifurcation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.q-bio/0512023,
  title  = {Co-transport-induced instability of membrane voltage in tip-growing cells},
  author = {M. Leonetti and P. Marcq and J. Nuebler and F. Homble},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:q-bio/0512023},
  year   = {2009}
}