The Missed Role of Cytoskeletal Filaments in Information Processing

Abstract

Recently, substantial experimental evidence on Cytoskeleton filaments have demonstrated that the concurrent propagation of both electrical signals along cytoskeleton filaments and electrochemical currents along the axonal membrane are highly possible. This discovery opened an unexplored frontier in understanding brain information processing, neural plasticity and changes in the cytoskeleton. However, the molecular mechanisms governing the bionanowire properties in cytoskeleton filaments under physiological and pathological conditions are still poorly understood. In this presentation, we introduce an innovative multi-scale approach able to account for the atomistic details of a protein molecular structure, its biological environment, and their impact on electrical impulses propagating along wild type Actin filaments. Our results for in-vitro and intracellular conditions show a significant influence of the voltage stimulus and biological environment on the electrical impulse shape, attenuation and propagation velocity. The filament is shown to sustain the ionic wave propagation at almost constant velocity for the in-vitro condition, whereas the intracellular condition displays a remarkable deceleration. As a unique feature, this multi-scale theory is able to account for molecular structure conformation (mutation) and biological environment changes (pH and ionic concentrations) often present in pathological conditions. Thus, it may be potentially useful in providing a molecular understanding for how and why age and inheritance conditions induce dysfunction and malformation in cytoskeleton filaments associated with a variety of neurological diseases. It is also applicable to other conducting biopolymers with relevance in biomedicine and biophysics and their potential nanotechnological applications.