Constitutive chemical biology: reconstruction of intercellular Ca2+transience by nonlinear oscillators

Abstract

ABSTRACT Networks of non-linear oscillators have a potential to simulate physiological functions of living system. Expected similarity in spatiotemporal behavior was obtained in between the inter-cellular concentration pulse in Ca 2+ triggered by f-sec laser irradiation and the current pulse propagation along excitable non-linear electrode pairs triggered by electric stimulus. These resemblances are owing to the same dynamical rules governing both biological and electrochemical systems. Keywords: Non-linear network, physiology, electrochemistry 1. INTRODUCTION Ubiquitous living things such as cells, organs, rhythms in the brain, the cardiac pacemaking and the peristaltic motion of the digestive tract are highly ordered self-assembled system in which non-linear chemical networks such as nerve and hormone govern their homeostatic and dynamic properties. The topologies of the networks determine their functions. The computer simulation has been a powerful method to evaluate the collective dynamics of coupled oscillators, described by Hodgkin-Huxley or Morris-Lecar schemes for the physiological interests [1,2]. Nevertheless, the experimental counter-parts investigating the relationship between the biological system and the collective functions of the artificial non-linear system have been limited. This asymmetric development in this field is owing to the lack of expandable well-identified non-linear oscillators. Among the artificial oscillators, a non-linear electrochemical oscillator is one of the outstanding candidate for that constitutive purpose because there is no upper limit in the coupling numbers, the three states; oscillatory, excitatory and chaotic states, are simply distinguished by adjusting the applied potentials [3-11]. This article will demonstrate our efforts to fill-up this missing rink by showing the similarity of the spatiotemporal response in biologically and electrochemically reconstructed systems.