TY - JOUR
T1 - Emergence of an optimal temperature in action-potential propagation through myelinated axons
AU - Song, Xinlin
AU - Wang, Hengtong
AU - Chen, Yong
AU - Lai, Ying Cheng
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants No. 11675008, No. 21434001, and No. 11447027. H.T.W. acknowledges additional supports from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant No. GK201503025 and the Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China under Grant No. 2016JQ1037. Y.C.L. is supported by the Office of Naval Research through Grant No. N00014-16-1-2828.
PY - 2019/9/30
Y1 - 2019/9/30
N2 - In biological organisms, an optimal temperature exists at which the system functioning is maximized or is most effective. To obtain a general and quantitative understanding of the emergence of the optimal temperature is a challenging task. We aim to gain insights into this significant problem in biological physics by addressing the problem of propagation of action potential in myelinated axons. In particular, we construct a Hodgkin-Huxley type of cortical, compartmental model to describe the nodes of Ranvier with coupling between a pair of neighboring compartments characterized by internodal conductance and investigate the effect of temperature on the propagation of the action potential. We conduct direct numerical simulations and develop a physical analysis by taking advantage of the spatially continuous approximation. We find that increasing the temperature requires a larger value of the critical internodal conductance for successful propagation. The striking finding is the spontaneous emergence of an optimal temperature in the sense that, for the propagation of a single action potential at a fixed value of the internodal conductance, the minimum average passage time for one node of Ranvier occurs at this temperature value. A remarkable phenomenon is that the value of the optimal temperature is similar to those of living biological systems observed in experiments.
AB - In biological organisms, an optimal temperature exists at which the system functioning is maximized or is most effective. To obtain a general and quantitative understanding of the emergence of the optimal temperature is a challenging task. We aim to gain insights into this significant problem in biological physics by addressing the problem of propagation of action potential in myelinated axons. In particular, we construct a Hodgkin-Huxley type of cortical, compartmental model to describe the nodes of Ranvier with coupling between a pair of neighboring compartments characterized by internodal conductance and investigate the effect of temperature on the propagation of the action potential. We conduct direct numerical simulations and develop a physical analysis by taking advantage of the spatially continuous approximation. We find that increasing the temperature requires a larger value of the critical internodal conductance for successful propagation. The striking finding is the spontaneous emergence of an optimal temperature in the sense that, for the propagation of a single action potential at a fixed value of the internodal conductance, the minimum average passage time for one node of Ranvier occurs at this temperature value. A remarkable phenomenon is that the value of the optimal temperature is similar to those of living biological systems observed in experiments.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevE.100.032416
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevE.100.032416
M3 - Article
C2 - 31639929
AN - SCOPUS:85072986911
VL - 100
JO - Physical Review E - Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
JF - Physical Review E - Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
SN - 1539-3755
IS - 3
M1 - 032416
ER -