How does intracellular Ca2+ oscillate: by chance or by the clock?

Action Potentials; Animals; Biophysics/methods; Calcium/metabolism; Calcium Signaling; Cell Membrane/metabolism; Diffusion; Electrophysiology/methods; Humans; Models, Biological; Neurons; Oscillometry; Stochastic Processes

Abstract :

[en] Ca2+ oscillations have been considered to obey deterministic dynamics for almost two decades. We show for four cell types that Ca2+ oscillations are instead a sequence of random spikes. The standard deviation of the interspike intervals (ISIs) of individual spike trains is similar to the average ISI; it increases approximately linearly with the average ISI; and consecutive ISIs are uncorrelated. Decreasing the effective diffusion coefficient of free Ca2+ using Ca2+ buffers increases the average ISI and the standard deviation in agreement with the idea that individual spikes are caused by random wave nucleation. Array-enhanced coherence resonance leads to regular Ca2+ oscillations with small standard deviation of ISIs.

Disciplines :

Life sciences: Multidisciplinary, general & others

Author, co-author :

Skupin, Alexander ; University of Luxembourg > Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB)

Kettenmann, Helmut

Winkler, Ulrike

Wartenberg, Maria

Sauer, Heinrich

Tovey, Stephen C.

Taylor, Colin W.

Falcke, Martin

External co-authors :