Can a death signal halflife be used to sense the

Authors: I A Kuznetsov A V Kuznetsov

Publish Date: 2014/10/11

Volume: 41, Issue: 1, Pages: 23-35

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Abstract

Neuron response to injury depends on the distance to the lesion site which means that neurons are capable of sensing this distance Several mechanisms explaining how neurons can do this have been proposed and it is possible that neurons use a combination of several mechanisms to make such measurements In this paper we investigate the feasibility of the simplest mechanism which is based on the hypothesis that death signals produced at the lesion site propagate toward the neuron soma The signals are propelled by dynein motors If signals have a finite halflife they decay as they propagate By measuring the concentration of death signals arriving to the soma neurons should thus be able to determine the distance to the injury site We develop and solve a transport equation based on the above model We investigate how a death signal distribution depends on the dynein velocity distribution We evaluate the efficiency of such a mechanism by investigating the sensitivity of death signal concentration at the soma to the distance to the injury site By using the hypothesis that system performance is optimized by evolution we evaluate death signal halflives that would maximize this sensitivity

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