Related papers: Evolutionary Analysis of Biological Excitability
In these companion papers, we study how the interrelated dynamics of sodium and potassium affect the excitability of neurons, the occurrence of seizures, and the stability of persistent states of activity. In this first paper, we construct…
An intense controversy has surrounded the mechanism of voltage-gating in ion channels. We interpreted the two leading models of voltage-gating with respect to the thermodynamic energetics of membrane insertion of the voltage-sensing…
Experiments show that the movement of eukaryotic cells is regulated by a process of phase separation of two competing enzymes on the cell membrane, that effectively amplifies shallow external gradients of chemical attractant. Notably, the…
Certain cellular processes take the form of activity pulses that can be interpreted in terms of noise-driven excitable dynamics. Here we present an overview of different gene circuit architectures that exhibit excitable pulses of protein…
The spontaneous generation of electrical activity underpins a number of essential physiological processes, and is observed even in tissues where specialized pacemaker cells have not been identified. The emergence of periodic oscillations in…
The motility of a fish keratocyte on a flat substrate exhibits two distinct regimes: the non-migrating and the migrating one. In both configurations the shape is fixed in time and, when the cell is moving, the velocity is constant in…
The movement of ionic solutions is an essential part of biology and technology. Fluidics, from nano- to micro- to microfluidics, is a burgeoning area of technology which is all about the movement of ionic solutions, on various scales. Many…
Pulsatory activity patterns, driven by mechanochemical feedback, are prevalent in many biological systems. Here we present a theoretical framework to elucidate the mechanical origin and regulation of pulsatile activity patterns within…
Voltage-activated ion channels vary randomly between open and closed states, influenced by the membrane potential and other factors. Signal transduction is enhanced by noise in a simple ion channel model. The enhancement occurs in a finite…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
We give an explicit formula for the membrane potential of cells in terms of the intracellular and extracellular ionic concentrations, and derive equations for the ionic currents that flow through channels, exchangers and electrogenic pumps.…
Collective electronic excitations "excitons" in planar optical lattices exhibit strong modifications of the radiative damping rate and directional emission pattern as compared to a single excited atom. Excitons for long wave numbers and…
We investigate the outflux of ions through the channels in a cell membrane. The channels undergo an open/close cycle according to a periodic schedule. Our study is based both on theoretical considerations relying on homogenization theory,…
We propose and study a model of hypothetical magnetosensitive ionic channels which are long thought to be a possible candidate to explain the influence of weak magnetic fields on living organisms ranging from magnetotactic bacteria to…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
In these companion papers, we study how the interrelated dynamics of sodium and potassium affect the excitability of neurons, the occurrence of seizures, and the stability of persistent states of activity. We seek to study these dynamics…
The opening rate of voltage-gated potassium ion channels exhibits a characteristic, knee-like turnover where the common exponential voltage-dependence changes suddenly into a linear one. An explanation of this puzzling crossover is put…
Potassium ion channels are critical components of biology. They conduct potassium ions across the cell membrane with remarkable speed and selectivity. Understanding how they do this is crucially important for applications in neuroscience,…
Stochastic thermodynamics has largely succeeded in characterizing both equilibrium and far-from-equilibrium phenomena. Yet many opportunities remain for application to mesoscopic complex systems -- especially biological ones -- whose…
The physiology of voltage gated ion channels is complex and insights into their gating mechanism is incomplete. Their function is best represented by Markov models with relatively large number of distinct states that are connected by…