A prototypical model of an ion channel

Abstract

So far we have been concerned with calcium-induced calcium release (CICR) as illustrated in Fig. 8.2 (page 126). To study CICR, we started by studying the development of the concentration of calcium ions in the dyad and kept everything else constant. The interesting part was then to see how the release mechanism of the ryanodine receptor RyR changes the dynamics of the dyad concentration. In particular, we were interested in RyR mutations and their theoretical effect on the dyad concentration through changes in the open probability of the RyR channel. We saw how theoretical blockers could be defined in order to repair the effect of the mutations, in the sense that we were able to restore essential properties of the process. We also introduced the effect of allowing the concentration of the junctional sarcoplasmic reticulum to change and we studied how the overall processes were affected by introducing the transmembrane potential and allowing the L-type calcium channel (LCC) to open and close.