Modeling of the pharyngeal muscle in based on FitzHugh-Nagumo equations

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

The pharyngeal pumping motion to send food to the bowel is a rhythmic movement in . We proposed a computer simulation of the pumping motion to investigate the mechanisms of rhythm phenomena in living organisms. To conduct the simulations we developed a mathematical model of the pharyngeal muscle that corresponds to the actual structure at a muscular level, and which generates the pumping rhythms. Each of 29 cells was modeled as a membrane potential model based on FitzHugh-Nagumo Equations to simulate the internal response. The electrophysiological responses of the pharyngeal muscular cells were measured as an electropharyngeogram (EPG) that records the activities of the pharynx as a signal pattern, including the membrane potentials in multiple cells. We also developed an EPG model that calculated EPG based on the outputs of individual membrane-potential models. We confirmed that our model of the pharynx could generate rhythms similar to the EPG measured from .