Related papers: Evolutionary Analysis of Biological Excitability
The origin of cellular life can be described in terms of the transition from inorganic matter: solids, liquids and gases, to the emergence of cooperative assemblies of organic matter, DNA and proteins,capable of replication and metabolism.…
A unified theoretical description is developed for the formation of an ionized filament channel in a dense-gas medium and the evolution of electronic degrees of freedom in this channel in the laser pulse wake, as illustrated on an example…
Rapid transduction of sensory stimulation to action is essential for an animal to survive. To this end, most animals use the sub-second excitable and multistable dynamics of a neuromuscular system. Here, studying an animal without neurons…
Transport of ions and small molecules across the cell membrane against electrochemical gradients is catalyzed by integral membrane proteins that use a source of free energy to drive the energetically uphill flux of the transported…
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…
Cells are often considered input-output devices that maximize the transmission of information by converting extracellular stimuli (input) via signaling pathways (communication channel) to cell behavior (output). However, in biological…
The paper studies the excitability properties of a generalized FitzHugh-Nagumo model. The model differs from the purely competitive FitzHugh-Nagumo model in that it accounts for the effect of cooperative gating variables such as activation…
Many cell types exhibit oscillatory activity, such as repetitive action potential firing due to the Hodgkin-Huxley dynamics of ion channels in the cell membrane or reveal intracellular inositol triphosphate (IP$_3$) mediated calcium…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
For ion channel gating, the appearance of two distinct conformational states and the discrete transitions between them is essential, and therefore of crucial importance to all living organisms. We show that the physical interplay between…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…
Gene expression is a central process to any form of life. It involves multiple temporal and functional scales that extend from specific protein-DNA interactions to the coordinated regulation of multiple genes in response to intracellular…
Much progress has been made in elucidating the inner workings of voltage-gated ion channels, but less understood is the influence of lipid rafts on gating kinetics. Here we propose that state-dependent channel affinity for different lipid…
Control of the living cell functions with remarkable reliability despite the stochastic nature of the underlying molecular networks -- a property presumably optimized by biological evolution. We here ask to what extent the property of a…
Gap junctions are channels in cell membranes allowing ions to pass directly between cells. They connect cells throughout the body, including heart myocytes, neurons, and astrocytes. Propagation mediated by gap junctions can be passive or…
We consider an exactly tractable model of the Kramers type for the voltage-dependent gating dynamics of single ion channels. It is assumed that the gating dynamics is caused by the thermally activated transitions in a bistable potential.…
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…
Many extended chemical and biological systems self-organise into complex patterns that drive the medium behaviour in a non-linear fashion. An important class of such systems are excitable media, including neural and cardiac tissues. In…
A long laser beam propagating through an underdense plasma produces a positively charged ion channel by expelling plasma electrons in the transverse direction. We consider the dynamics of a test electron in a resulting two-dimensional…
This work proposes a two-dimensional electrophysiological model for describing neuronal responses to external electric stimuli under patch-clamped conditions. Our proposed model successfully captures the key features of the Hodgkin-Huxley…