No label defined (Q4336028)

Nerve cells communicate with each other or with muscle cells by the voltage-triggered release of chemicals called neurotransmitters. These transmitters are contained in tiny vesicles, which are located in nerve terminals. Once released, the transmitter molecules activate a target cell by binding to specific receptors. The region that connects the releasing nerve terminal to the target cell is called a synapse. When a voltage spike is triggered in the nerve and travels down its wire-like axon to tiny output fibers and hence to the terminals, neurotransmitter vesicles react to the depolarization (increase in voltage of the cell interior with respect to its exterior) by fusing with specific sites on the nearby presynaptic cell membrane. A pore forms in the fusion region. The transmitter moves out through the pore and diffuses across a narrow gap to the postsynaptic target cell. The summed effects of excitatory and inhibitory transmitters on each postsynaptic cell govern the next event in the signalling chain -- but these events will not concern us here. In collaboration with the neurobiologist H. Parnas of the Hebrew University and others, I have been working for 15 years to model the complex events of the release process. There has been strong interaction with experiment. The evolution of the models will be traced here. The final section contains general remarks, based on the case study of neurotransmitter release, concerning the application of mathematics to biology.