EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Soliton-mediated ionic pulses and coupled ionic excitations in a dissipative electrical network model of microtubules

Eric Tankou, Conrad Bertrand Tabi and Timoléon Crépin Kofané

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 2022, vol. 162, issue C

Abstract: Many cellular activities are mediated by microtubules (MTs), with most electrophysiological processes depending on ionic flow through MT cylinders. This paper addresses such conductive features by representing the MT as a nonlinear electrical transmission line composed of capacitive and dissipative properties. Thanks to the semi-discrete approximation near the continuum limit, coupled ionic pulses flowing along cellular microtubules are described by a set of coupled cubic complex Ginzburg-Landau (CGL) equations whose one of the solutions is a plane wave. The stability of the latter is checked, under weak modulation, using an explicit analytical expression for the modulational instability (MI) growth rate. The parametric analysis of the instability growth rate allows detecting parameter regions where ionic conductivity, through modulated waves, in the MT network is likely to occur. Dissipative bright-bright pulse soliton solutions for the nonlinearly coupled cubic CGL equations are constructed using a modified Hirota's bilinear method. A generalized coupled mode for the discrete ionic signal is proposed and used as the initial condition to be propagated in the nonlinear electrical transmission lattice of MT under direct numerical simulations. The ionic pulse transfer, mediated by the nonlinear interaction between oscillatory modes, is manifested by the formation of trains of modulated waves whose behaviors depend on the right choice of system parameters. Those results theoretically suggest that coupled ionic signals may facilitate information processing involving MTs.

Keywords: Microtubules; Electrical transmission line; Dissipative bright-bright soliton; Modulational instability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960077922006567
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chsofr:v:162:y:2022:i:c:s0960077922006567

DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2022.112446

Access Statistics for this article

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals is currently edited by Stefano Boccaletti and Stelios Bekiros

More articles in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thayer, Thomas R. ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:chsofr:v:162:y:2022:i:c:s0960077922006567