Supervisors:

Mark van Rossum (School of Psychology and Mathematical Sciences) and Paul Smith (School of Life Sciences)

Description:

Electric current is crucial in neurons and other biological tissue, but while in electronics the charge carriers are electrons, in biology this role is taken by ions, in particular sodium, potassium and chloride. In and outside cells, ions move both under the influence of random diffusion and of the electric field. The electric field is in turn determined by the spatial distribution of the ions, so it gets complicated. The result is the electro-diffusion equation, which is a nonlinear spatio-temporal differential equation. The electro-diffusion equation was until recently too involved to simulate and often approximations were required. More recently, simulation of electro-diffusion has become possible for realistic situations.
In this project we will simulate electro-diffusion in a number of cases of biological relevance, namely the ionic current flows in fat-cells, and around cells surrounded by a charged medium.

Desirable skills:

• Strong analytical skills, e.g. knowledge of differential equations. Affinity with numerical analysis.
• No prior biology knowledge required.

• Qian, N., & Sejnowski, T. J. (1989). An electro-diffusion model for computing membrane potentials and ionic concentrations in branching dendrites, spines and axons. Biological Cybernetics, 62(1), 1-15.
• Savtchenko, Leonid P., Mu Ming Poo, and Dmitri A. Rusakov. “Electrodiffusion phenomena in neuroscience: a neglected companion.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 18.10 (2017): 598.

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