Multiple Scales in calcium signals

G SOLOVEY

Punta del Este

Congreso; Conference on Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics and Nonlinear Physics (MEDYFINOL); 2008

The hierarchical organization of living organisms at all levels, from single cells to the brain, has its counterpart at the level of cell signals. Moreover, cells themselves are very complex objects that integrate a broad spectrum of phenomena. This is why there is a large diversity of possible strategies to understand signaling mechanisms at the cellular level, each focusing on a particular phenomena or spatio-temporal scale. In this talk, I will focus on intracellular calcium signaling. The importance of these signals is that the calcium ion is involved in a variety of signaling pathways associated to such diverse phenomena as fertilization, cell death or neuronal communication. For this reason, calcium is said to be a universal messenger whose spatio-temporal distribution determines the subsequent cell's behavior. I will show how we combine experiments with mathematical modeling to build a complete description of intracellular calcium signals. In particular, an original analysis of experimental observations gives us quantitative information on the properties of the calcium release and a model we developed opens the way to simulate this system on experimentally relevant time scales and despite large intracellular gradients.