Actin Networks Voltage Circuits

TL;DR

This paper models actin filament networks as electrical circuits, demonstrating their potential to implement logical gates and finite state machines, bridging biological structures with computational functions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel electrical modeling approach for actin networks, showing their capability to perform logical operations and state transitions.

Findings

Networks can implement basic logical gates.

Electrical parameters depend on network structure.

Finite state machines can be realized with actin networks.

Abstract

Starting with an experimentally observed networks of actin bundles, we model their network structure in terms of edges and nodes. We then compute and discuss the main electrical parameters, considering the bundles as electrical wires. A set of equations describing the network is solved with several initial conditions. Input voltages, that can be considered as information bits, are applied in a set of points and output voltages are computed in another set of positions. We consider both an idealized situation, where point-like electrodes can be inserted in any points of the bundles and a more realistic one, where electrodes lay on a surface and have typical dimensions available in the industry. We find that in both cases such a system can implement the main logical gates and a finite state machine.