The Electrical Analogue Computer of Microtubule’s Protofilament

Abstract EN

Microtubules as essential biopolymers implicated into electrical intracellular transport open a lot of questions about their intrinsic character of dynamic instability.

Both experimental and theoretical investigations are used to understand their behavior in order to mimic and build powerful and smart biomaterials.

So, in this paper, by analytical and computational approaches, we proposed an electrical analogue computer of microtubule’s protofilament drawing from the partial differential equation which describes microtubule’s motion.

Using the computing elements, namely, operational amplifiers, capacitors, and resistors, we designed analytically the bioelectronic circuit of the microtubule’s protofilament.

To validate our model, Runge–Kutta code was used to solve the partial differential equation of MT’s motion on software Matlab, and then, the results obtained are used as a controller to fit and validate numerical results obtained by running the bioelectronic circuit on software PSpice.

It is shown that the analogue circuit displayed spontaneous electrical activity consistent with self-sustained electrical oscillations.

We found out that two behaviors were exhibited by the voltage generated from the electrical analogue computer of MT’s protofilament; amplification and damping behaviors are modulated by the values of the resistor of the summing operational amplifier.

From our study, it is shown that low values of the resistor promote damping behavior while high values of the resistor promote an amplification behavior.

So microtubule’s protofilament exhibits different spontaneous regimes leading to different oscillatory modes.

This study put forward the possibility to build microtubule’s protofilament as a biotransistor.