Related papers: A biophysical model explains the spontaneous burst…
Calcium (Ca) plays an important role in regulating various cellular processes. In a variety of cell types, Ca signaling occurs within microdomains where channels deliver localized pulses of Ca which activate a nearby collection of…
Excitable media are systems which are at rest in the absence of external input but which respond to a sufficiently strong stimulus by sending a wave of "excitation" across the medium. Examples include cardiac and cortical tissue, and in…
We consider a stochastic version of an excitable system based on the Morris-Lecar model of a neuron, in which the noise originates from stochastic Sodium and Potassium ion channels opening and closing. One can analyze neural excitability in…
It has been recently shown that the exponential growth rate of a population of bacterial cells starting from a single cell shows transient oscillations due to early synchronized bursts of division. These oscillations are enhanced by cell…
The physical origin of enhanced star formation activity in interacting galaxies remains an open question. Knowing whether starbursts are triggered by an increase of the quantity of dense gas or an increase of the star formation efficiency…
Interruptions in nonlinear wave propagation, commonly referred to as wave breaks, are typical of many complex excitable systems. In the heart they lead to fatal rhythm disorders, the so-called arrhythmias, which are one of the main causes…
Calcium carbonate is a model system to investigate the mechanism of solid formation by precipitation from solutions, and it is often considered in the debated classical and non-classical nucleation mechanism. Despite the great scientific…
Eukaryotic cells and intracellular pathogens such as bacteria or viruses utilize the actin polymerization machinery to propel themselves forward. Thereby, the onset of motion and choice of direction may be the result of a spontaneous…
Rhythms in electrical activity in the membrane of cells in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) are crucial for the function of the circadian timing system, which is characterized by the expression of the so-called clock genes. Intracellular…
Recent experimental observations have supported the hypothesis that the cerebral cortex operates in a dynamical regime near criticality, where the neuronal network exhibits a mixture of ordered and disordered patterns. However, A…
Intracellular calcium is regulated in part by the release of Ca$^{2+}$ ions from the endoplasmic reticulum via inositol-4,5-triphosphate receptor (IP$_3$R) channels (among other possibilities such as RyR and L-type calcium channels). The…
Long-time series of neuronal recordings are resulting from the activity of connected neuronal networks. Yet how neuronal properties can be extracted remains empirical. We review here the data analysis based on network models to recover…
How is reliable physiological function maintained in cells despite considerable variability in the values of key parameters of multiple interacting processes that govern that function? Here we use the classic Hodgkin-Huxley formulation of…
Proliferating cells properly divide into their daughter cells through a process that is mediated by kinetochores, protein-complexes that assemble at the centromere of each sister chromatid. Each kinetochore has to establish a tight bipolar…
The neuron consumes energy from ATP hydrolysis to maintain a far-from-equilibrium steady state inside the cell, thus all physiological functions inside the cell are modulated by thermodynamics. The neurons that manage information encoding,…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
The onset of regular bursts in a group of irregularly bursting neurons with different individual properties is one of the most interesting dynamical properties found in neurobiological systems. In this paper we show how synchronization…
In this paper we use a continuous model to describe the development of a single cell lineage following the committal of stem cells. Three separate controls are implemented in the model, namely the proliferative control of stem cells, the…
There has become of increasing interest in transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) since its inception nearly a decade ago. tACS in modulating brain state is an active area of research and has been demonstrated effective in…
We use a biophysical model of a local neuronal circuit to study the implications of synaptic plasticity for the detection of weak sensory stimuli. Networks with fast plastic coupling show behavior consistent with stochastic resonance.…