Related papers: A Mechatronics view at nerve conduction
The common description of the electrical behavior of a nematic liquid crystal as an anisotropic dielectric medium with (weak) ohmic conductivity is extended to an electrodiffusion model with two active ionic species. Under appropriate, but…
We present a detailed study of the conduction properties of a molecular wire where hopping processes between electronic sites are coupled to a vibrational mode of the molecule. The latter is sandwiched between two electronic leads at finite…
Collagen is the key protein of connective tissue (i.e., skin, tendons and ligaments, cartilage, among others) accounting for 25% to 35% of the whole-body protein content, and entitled of conferring mechanical stability. This protein is also…
The transport of molecules through biological and synthetic nanopores is governed by multiple stochastic processes that lead to noisy, fluctuating currents. Disentangling the characteristics of different noise-generating mechanisms is…
Models of pulse formation in nerve conduction have provided manifold insight not only into neuronal dynamics but also the non-linear dynamics of pulse formation in general. Recent observation of neuronal electro-chemical pulses also driving…
The textbook picture of nerve activity is that of a propagating voltage pulse driven by electrical currents through ion channel proteins, which are gated by changes in voltage, temperature, pressure or by drugs. All function is directly…
The local structure of liquid water as a function of temperature is a source of intense research. This structure is intimately linked to the dynamics of water molecules, which can be measured using Raman and infrared spectroscopies. The…
Noisy saltatory spike propagation along myelinated axons is studied within a stochastic Hodgkin-Huxley model. The intrinsic noise (whose strength is inverse proportional to the nodal membrane size) arising from fluctuations of the number of…
Previous studies on peristalsis, the pumping of fluid along a channel by wave-like displacements of the channel walls, have shown that the elastic properties of the channel and the peristaltic wave shape can influence the flow rate.…
Sensory neurons give highly variable responses to stimulation, which can limit the amount of stimulus information available to downstream circuits. Much work has investigated the factors that affect the amount of information encoded in…
We consider noise-assisted spike propagation in myelinated axons within a multi-compartment stochastic Hodgkin-Huxley model. The noise originates from a finite number of ion channels in each node of Ranvier. For the subthreshold internodal…
Dynamic structuring of water is a key player in a large class of processes underlying biochemical and technological developments today, the latter often involving electric fields. However, the anisotropic coupling between the water…
In capillary electrophoresis, sample ions migrate along a micro-capillary filled with a background electrolyte under the influence of an applied electric field. If the sample concentration is sufficiently high, the electrical conductivity…
Recent experimental studies indicate that visual cognition is accompanied by slowly propagating biophysical travelling waves in cortical tissue. Here we propose polarization waves as a coherent physical framework for visual cognition. We…
A new model for the interaction of an electric pulse with a lipid membrane is proposed. Using this model we show that when a DC electric pulse is applied to an insulating lipid membrane separating fluids with different conductivities, the…
The current-voltage (I-V) conversion characterizes the physiology of cellular microdomains and reflects cellular communication, excitability, and electrical transduction. Yet deriving such I-V laws remains a major challenge in most cellular…
The driving of vibrational motion by external electric fields is a topic of continued interest, due to the possibility of assessing new or metastable material phases with desirable properties. Here, we combine ab initio molecular dynamics…
We show that during evaporation of a pore network, liquid can refill the gas occupied pores, snapping off a gas bubble, which then moves to a stable configuration. This phenomenon is induced by the capillary instability due to the…
Transient wave forms in neural networks with diffusive and nonlocal coupling have attracted particular interest because they may mediate recruitment of healthy cortical tissue into a pathological state during migraine. To investigate this…
Living systems are chiral on multiple scales, from constituent biopolymers to large scale morphology, and their active mechanics is both driven by chiral components and serves to generate chiral morphologies. We describe the mechanics of…