Diesel Exhaust Worsens Cardiac Conduction Instability in Dobutamine-Challenged Wistar-Kyoto and Spontaneously Hypertensive Rats.

Short-term exposure to air pollution, particularly from vehicular sources, increases the risk of acute clinical cardiovascular events. However, cardiotoxicity is not always clearly discernible under ambient conditions; therefore, more subtle measures of cardiac dysfunction are necessary to elucidate the latent effects of exposure. Determine the effect of whole diesel exhaust (DE) exposure on reserve of refractoriness (RoR), an intrinsic electrophysiological measure of the heart's minimum level of refractoriness relative to development of electrical conduction instability, in rats undergoing exercise-like stress. Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) and spontaneously hypertensive (SH) rats implanted with radiotelemeters to continuously collect electrocardiogram (ECG) and heart rate were exposed to 150 µg/m3 of DE and challenged with dobutamine 24 h later to mimic exercise-induced increases of the heart rate. The Chernyak-Starobin-Cohen (CSC) model was then applied to the ECG-derived QT and RR intervals collected during progressive increases in heart rate to calculate RoR for each rat. Filtered air-exposed WKY and SH rats did not have any decrease in RoR, which indicates increased risk of cardiac conduction instability; however, DE caused a significant decrease in both strains. Yet, the decrease in RoR in SH rats was eight times steeper when compared to WKY rats indicating greater cardiac conduction instability in the hypertensive strain. These data indicate that after exposure to DE, risk of cardiac instability increases during increasing stress, particularly in the presence of underlying cardiovascular disease. Furthermore, the CSC model, which was previously shown to reveal cardiac risk in humans, can be applied to rodent toxicology studies.

The relationship between nernst equilibrium variability and the multifractality of interspike intervals in the hippocampus.

Spatiotemporal patterns of action potentials are considered to be closely related to information processing in the brain. Auto-generating neurons contributing to these processing tasks are known to cause multifractal behavior in the inter-spike intervals of the output action potentials. In this paper we define a novel relationship between this multifractality and the adaptive Nernst equilibrium in hippocampal neurons. Using this relationship we are able to differentiate between various drugs at varying dosages. Conventional methods limit their ability to account for cellular charge depletion by not including these adaptive Nernst equilibria. Our results provide a new theoretical approach for measuring the effects which drugs have on single-cell dynamics.

Nonequilibrium current-carrying steady states in the anisotropic XY spin chain.

Out-of-equilibrium behavior is explored in the one-dimensional anisotropic XY model. Initially preparing the system in the isotropic XX model with a linearly varying magnetic field to create a domain-wall magnetization profile, dynamics is generated by rapidly changing the exchange interaction anisotropy and external magnetic field. Relaxation to a nonequilibrium steady state is studied analytically at the critical transverse Ising point, where correlation functions may be computed in closed form. For arbitrary values of anisotropy and external field, an effective generalized Gibbs' ensemble is shown to accurately describe observables in the long-time limit. Additionally, we find spatial oscillations in the exponentially decaying, transverse spin-spin correlation functions with wavelength set by the magnetization jump across the initial domain wall. This wavelength depends only weakly on anisotropy and magnetic field in contrast to the current, which is highly dependent on these parameters.

Bursting regimes in a reaction-diffusion system with action potential-dependent equilibrium.

The equilibrium Nernst potential plays a critical role in neural cell dynamics. A common approximation used in studying electrical dynamics of excitable cells is that the ionic concentrations inside and outside the cell membranes act as charge reservoirs and remain effectively constant during excitation events. Research into brain electrical activity suggests that relaxing this assumption may provide a better understanding of normal and pathophysiological functioning of the brain. In this paper we explore time-dependent ionic concentrations by allowing the ion-specific Nernst potentials to vary with developing transmembrane potential. As a specific implementation, we incorporate the potential-dependent Nernst shift into a one-dimensional Morris-Lecar reaction-diffusion model. Our main findings result from a region in parameter space where self-sustaining oscillations occur without external forcing. Studying the system close to the bifurcation boundary, we explore the vulnerability of the system with respect to external stimulations which disrupt these oscillations and send the system to a stable equilibrium. We also present results for an extended, one-dimensional cable of excitable tissue tuned to this parameter regime and stimulated, giving rise to complex spatiotemporal pattern formation. Potential applications to the emergence of neuronal bursting in similar two-variable systems and to pathophysiological seizure-like activity are discussed.

Ordering and stability in lipid droplets with applications to low-density lipoproteins.

In this article, we present a framework for investigating the order-disorder transition in lipid droplets using the standard Ising model. While a single lipid droplet is itself a complex system whose constituent cholesteryl esters each possesses many degrees of freedom, we present justification for using this effective approach to isolate the underlying physics. It is argued that the behavior of the esters confined within lipid droplets is significantly different from that of a bulk system of similar esters, which is adequately described by continuum mean-field theory in the thermodynamic limit. When the droplet's shell is modeled as an elastic membrane, a simple picture emerges for a transition between two ordered phases within the core which is tuned by the strength of interactions between the esters. Triglyceride concentration is proposed as a variable which strongly influences the strength of interactions between cholesteryl esters within droplets. The possible relevance of this mechanism to the well known atherogenic nature of small low-density lipoprotein particles is discussed in detail.

Modeling order-disorder transition in Low-Density Lipoprotein.

Low Density Lipoproteins (LDL) undergo a reversible order-disorder thermal transition close to biological temperature due to cooperative melting of the cholesteryl esters (CE) in the core of the LDL particle. We have noticed that chain-chain interactions between CE molecules are responsible for the stability of the ordered smectic phase; thus, we formulated a simple "coarse-grained" two-state model to describe the melting process. In this model only nearest neighbor interactions are allowed. On the basis of these assumptions we performed Metropolis Monte Carlo (MC) simulation in order to obtain the heat capacity curve. The resulting profile reveals well-known features of the systems with a finite size.

Quantum quenches in an XXZ spin chain from a spatially inhomogeneous initial state.

Results are presented for the nonequilibrium dynamics of a quantum XXZ -spin chain whose spins are initially arranged in a domain wall profile via the application of a magnetic field in the z direction, which is spatially varying along the chain. The system is driven out of equilibrium in two ways: a). by rapidly turning off the magnetic field, b). by rapidly quenching the interactions at the same time as the magnetic field is turned off. The time evolution of the domain wall profile as well as various two-point spin correlation functions are studied by the exact solution of the fermionic problem for the XX chain and via a bosonization approach and a mean-field approach for the XXZ chain. At long times the magnetization is found to equilibrate (reach the ground state value), while the two-point correlation functions in general do not. In particular, for quenches within the gapless XX phase, the spin correlation function transverse to the z direction acquires a spatially inhomogeneous structure at long times whose details depend on the initial domain wall profile. The spatial inhomogeneity is also recovered for the case of classical spins initially arranged in a domain wall profile and shows that the inhomogeneities arise due to the dephasing of transverse spin components as the domain wall broadens. A generalized Gibbs ensemble approach is found to be inadequate in capturing this spatially inhomogeneous state.