Simulating Morphology-Controlled Cellular and Subcellular Electro-Calcium Dynamics
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Many cell types rely on electrical signaling to encode and transfer information from cell to cell, as well as to trigger subcellular biochemical processes. Many cellular and subcellular signaling pathways are governed by calcium. Neurons, cardiac myocytes, T-cells, and many other cells are equipped with a vast set of calcium-regulating mechanisms, which can finely tune the cellular calcium code. In neurons for example, this spatio-temporal calcium code is used to regulate biochemical cascades in the cell nucleus that trigger transcription responses relevant for learning and survival. Subcellular pathways are further controlled by the three-dimensional architecture of cells and their organelles. In this talk we will introduce a comprehensive calcium model for neurons (which also translates to other cell types), discuss discretization methods that auto-improve computational grid quality for complex domain discretizations, based on subdivision theory, and provide an implicit-explicit finite element scheme for solving the calcium model on complex cellular domains. Applications of this framework include a study of geometry-controlled synapse to nucleus calcium signaling, which has further implications for studying Alzheimer's disease.
