Zeng Shangyou, Tang Yi
College of Electronic Engineering, Guangxi Normal University, Guangxi 541004, People's Republic of China.
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2009 Aug;80(2 Pt 1):021917. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.80.021917. Epub 2009 Aug 17.
In most unmyelinated axons, ion channels are distributed uniformly along the axon to facilitate stable propagation of action potentials. In this case, the conduction in the axon is continuous, and the excitability along the membrane is constant. Some experimental papers show that ion channels also locate in clusters in some unmyelinated axons. In this paper, we investigate theoretically the effect of clustered ion channels along unmyelinated axon. We mainly focused on two aspects: the propagation efficiency and the propagation speed. Our results show that localization of potassium ion channels is beneficial for increasing propagation efficiency and propagation speed of action potentials; however, localization of sodium ion channels is advantageous to the propagation efficiency only when axonal parameters are in a specific range.
在大多数无髓鞘轴突中，离子通道沿轴突均匀分布，以促进动作电位的稳定传播。在这种情况下，轴突中的传导是连续的，沿膜的兴奋性是恒定的。一些实验论文表明，在一些无髓鞘轴突中离子通道也成簇分布。在本文中，我们从理论上研究了无髓鞘轴突上成簇离子通道的作用。我们主要关注两个方面：传播效率和传播速度。我们的结果表明，钾离子通道的定位有利于提高动作电位的传播效率和传播速度；然而，钠离子通道的定位仅在轴突参数处于特定范围内时才有利于传播效率。
