A Multi-Scale Approach to Describe Electrical Impulses Propagating along Actin Filaments in both Intracellular and In-vitro Conditions

TL;DR

This paper presents a multi-scale analytical approach to model electrical impulse propagation along actin filaments, accounting for molecular details and environmental factors, predicting soliton-like signals in biological and laboratory conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, simple analytic model for electrical impulses in actin filaments that incorporates atomistic and environmental details, advancing understanding of bioelectrical signal transmission.

Findings

Electrical impulses propagate as solitons under various conditions.

Electrolyte and voltage influence impulse shape and velocity.

Model applicable to other charged biopolymers and pathological states.

Abstract

An accurate and efficient characterization of the polyelectrolyte properties for cytoskeleton filaments are key to the molecular understanding of electrical signal propagation, bundle and network formation, as well as other relevant physicochemical processes associated with biological functions in eukaryotic cells and their potential nanotechnological applications. In this article, we introduce an innovative multi-scale approach able to account for the atomistic details of a proteins molecular structure, its biological environment, and their impact on electrical impulses propagating along wild type Actin filaments. The approach provides a novel, simple, accurate, approximate analytic expression for the characterization of electrical impulses in the shape of soliton waveforms. It has been successfully used to determine the effects of electrolyte conditions and voltage stimulus on the electrical impulse shape, attenuation and kern propagation velocity in these systems. Our results predict the propagation of electrical signal impulses in the form of solitons for the range of voltage stimulus and electrolyte solutions typically present in intracellular and in-vitro conditions. This multi-scale theory may also be applicable to other highly charged rod-like polyelectrolytes with relevance in biomedicine and biophysics. It is also able to account for molecular structure conformation (mutation) and biological environment (protonations/deprotonations) changes often present in pathological conditions.