Membranes with the same ion channel populations but different excitabilities.

ABSTRACT: Electrical signaling allows communication within and between different tissues and is necessary for the survival of multicellular organisms. The ionic transport that underlies transmembrane currents in cells is mediated by transporters and channels. Fast ionic transport through channels is typically modeled with a conductance-based formulation that describes current in terms of electrical drift without diffusion. In contrast, currents written in terms of drift and diffusion are not as widely used in the literature in spite of being more realistic and capable of displaying experimentally observable phenomena that conductance-based models cannot reproduce (e.g. rectification). The two formulations are mathematically related: conductance-based currents are linear approximations of drift-diffu

SUBMITTER: Herrera-Valdez MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3327720 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature