An Electrophysiological model of the pharyngeal muscle in

Hattori, Yuya; Suzuki, Michiyo; So, Zu*; Kobayashi, Yasuhiko; Tsuji, Toshio*

The pharyngeal pumping motion to send food to bowel is one of rhythmic movements in . In the present study we introduce the computer simulation of biological responses to investigate the mechanism of rhythm generation of the pharyngeal muscle. To conduct the simulations, we develop a mathematical model of the pharynx that corresponds to the actual structure at a muscular level and is possible to generate the pumping rhythms. Each of 20 muscular cells was represented as an electrophysiological model that calculates the individual membrane potential to simulate the behavior of membrane potentials and the characteristics of each pharyngeal muscular cell. The connections between individual muscular-cell models were defined based on the actual electrical connections of muscular cells so as to transmit the membrane potentials. To examine whether the proposed model can generate the pumping rhythms in the pharynx, we simulated the electropharyngeogram (EPG), which is caused by the electrophysiological response of muscular cells and is one of the few signals possible to measure. We confirmed that the proposed model could generate rhythms similar to the EPG measured from . Moreover, our model could reproduce the EPG of a mutant. This is probably the first study that constructed a mathematical model of pharynx in and successfully simulated its rhythmic signals.