event
Thursday 24 May 2012: Imaging pattern formation in excitable media
Gil Bub - University of oxford
Harrison 215 11:00-12:00
Networks of excitable cells, such as those found in the heart and brain, display a wide range of macroscopic spatio-temporal patterns. These patterns may drive cell activity in non intuitive ways; cardiac cells, which beat periodically in isolation, display bursting behaviour when coupled in a network. Experiments where connectivity and density are varied in monolayer cultures of spontaneously beating heart cells suggest that sharp transitions between patterns can be driven by a gradual change of a control parameter. Further, simulations with simple excitable media models indicate that transitions can be predicted by the interplay between heterogeneity density, connectivity and generic properties of the wavefront. However, current imaging modalities are not able to fully capture the dynamics of the experimental preparation, limiting our understanding of how cell level activity leads to pattern formation at macroscopic scales. New approaches are now being developed will allow multiscale imaging of these complex systems.
