Related papers: Evolutionary Analysis of Biological Excitability
Ion channels are specific proteins present in the membranes of living cells. They control the flow of specific ions through a cell, initiated by an ion channel's electrochemical gradient. In doing so, they control important physiological…
All living cells interact dynamically with a constantly changing world. Eukaryotes in particular, evolved radically new ways to sense and react to their environment. These advances enabled new and more complex forms of cellular behavior in…
This paper presents in-depth analysis of the excitable membranes of a biological system. We rigorously prove from the Chay neuron model that the state dependent voltage-sensitive potassium ion-channel and calcium sensitive potassium…
Ion channels are membrane proteins responsible for an enormous range of biological functions. Ion selectivity and permeation are based on simple laws of physics and chemistry. Ion channels are therefore ideal candidates for physical…
Potassium channels play critical roles in many physiological processes, providing a selective permeation route for K+ ions in and out of a cell, by employing a carefully designed selectivity filter, evolutionarily conserved from viruses to…
Ion channels are proteins with holes down their middle that control the flow of ions and electric current across otherwise impermeable biological membranes. The flow of sodium, potassium, calcium (divalent), and chloride ions have been…
This chapter revisits the concept of excitability, a basic system property of neurons. The focus is on excitable systems regarded as behaviors rather than dynamical systems. By this we mean open systems modulated by specific interconnection…
The study of selection and gating in potassium channels is a very important issue in modern biology. Indeed such structures are known in all types of cells in all organisms where they play many important functional roles. The mechanism of…
We use the qualitative insight of a planar neuronal phase portrait to detect an excitability switch in arbitrary conductance-based models from a simple mathematical condition. The condition expresses a balance between ion channels that…
Potassium (K-) channels catalyze K+ ion permeation across cellular membranes while simultaneously discriminating their permeation over Na+ ions by more than a factor of a thousand. Structural studies show bare K+ ions occupying the…
Experiments on single ionic channels have contributed to a large extent to our current view on the function of cell membrane. In these experiments the main observables are the physical quantities: ionic concentration, membrane electrostatic…
Emergence and maintenance of excitability is often phrased in terms of arriving at and remaining about a manifold of 'solutions' embedded in a high dimensional parameter space. Alongside studies that extend traditional focus on…
Ion transport is the major determining factor of salinity tolerance in plants. A simple scheme of a plant cell with ion fluxes provides basic understanding of ion transport and the corresponding changes of ion concentrations under salinity.…
Noise induced excitability is studied in type I and II Morris-Lecar neurons subject to constant sub threshold input, where fluctuations arise from sodium and potassium ion channels. Ion channels open and close randomly, creating current…
The electrophysiology of betacells is at the origin of insulin secretion. Betacells exhibit a complex behaviour upon stimulation with glucose including repeated and uninterrupted bursting. Mathematical modelling is most suitable to improve…
The thermodynamic (TD) properties of biological membranes play a central role for living systems. It has been suggested, for instance, that nonlinear pulses such as action potentials (APs) can only exist if the membrane state is in vicinity…
Classical models for predicting current flow in excitable cells such as axons, originally proposed by Hodgkin and Huxley, rely on empirical voltage-gating parameters that quantify ion transport across sodium and potassium ion channels. We…
Ion channels are proteins with a hole down the middle embedded in cell membranes. Membranes form insulating structures and the channels through them allow and control the movement of charged particles, spherical ions, mostly Na+, K+, Ca++,…
Activity and renewability are distinctive features of living matter, and constitute a new class of materials that we term renewable active matter. A striking example is the cell cytoskeleton, where myosin filaments bind to the actin…
We study the effect of intracellular ion diffusion on ionic currents permeating through the cell membrane. Ion flux across the cell membrane is mediated by special proteins forming specific channels. The structure of potassium channels have…