A Mathematical Model for the Assembly of Ion Channel Clusters in Cardiac and Smooth Muscle Cells

Various membrane ion channels have been shown to cluster in excitable cells. However, the mechanism of spatiotemporal organization of cluster complexes is unknown. We used super resolution microscopy to study the time course of membrane expression of CaV1.2 and TRPV4 channels in transfected tsA‐201 cells. Channel clusters vary in size but can be fit exponentially at all time points. Similarly, mean cluster size and cluster density increase rapidly, but eventually reach a plateau around 24 hours post transfection. Using our findings, we devised a model for stochastic cluster assembly based on probabilities of three factors: cluster nucleation, growth and removal. This model reproduced distributions from previous studies of various channels in different tissues and suggests that a feedback process is responsible for determining a setpoint of cluster density and size.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.