title: Emergence and maintenance of excitability: kinetics over structure.
abstract: The capacity to generate action potentials in neurons and other excitable cells requires tuning of both ionic channel expression and kinetics in a large parameter space. Alongside studies that extend traditional focus on control-based regulation of structural parameters (channel densities), there is a budding interest in self-organization of kinetic parameters. In this picture, ionic channels are continually forced by activity in-and-out of a pool of states not available for the mechanism of excitability. The process, acting on expressed structure, provides a bed for generation of a spectrum of excitability modes. Driven by microscopic fluctuations over a broad range of temporal scales, self-organization of kinetic parameters enriches the concepts and tools used in the study of development of excitability.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physiology & Biophysics, Faculty of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel. Electronic address: marom@technion.ac.il.
authors.forename: Shimon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Marom
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D007473:Ion Channels / Q000235:genetics; D007700:Kinetics; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*
chemical_list: D007473:Ion Channels