Investigation of the role of ion channels in human pancreatic β-cell hubs: A mathematical modeling study.

In many cellular networks, the structure of the network follows a scale-free organization, where a limited number of cells are strongly coupled to other cells. These cells are called hub cells and their critical roles are well accepted. Despite their importance, there have been only a few studies investigating the characteristic features of these cells. In this paper, a computational approach is proposed to study the possible role of different ion channels in distinguishing between the hub and non-hub cells. The results show that the P/Q-type and T-type calcium channels may have an especial role in the β-cell hubs because the high-level expressions of these channels make a pancreatic β-cell more potent to force other coupled cells to follow it. In addition, in order to consider the variation of the coupling strength with voltage, a novel mathematical model is proposed for the gap junction coupling between the pancreatic β-cells. The proposed approach is validated based on the data from the literature.