Agonist Fluctuation Maintained Calcium Signaling in a Mesoscopic System

Signal transduction in living systems is inevitably disturbed by stochastic factors, such as the internal molecular noise, random openings and closings of voltage-gated membrane channels, thermal fluctuations of membrane potential etc. Many investigations have been done to explore the effects of stochastic factors on calcium signals (Ullah & Jung, 2006; Falcke, 2004; Li et al., 2005; Dupont et al., 2008; Perc et al., 2008). Ullah & Jung (2006) found that signaling model that taking the stochastic channel behavior into consideration can accurately describe the statistically properties of the elementary calcium release events; Falcke (2004) reviewed the stochastic clustering character of ion channel and found that there is an optimal cluster size that best sustain the signaling; Li et al. (2005) investigated the role of internal molecular noise in intracellular calcium oscillations. In most ABSTRACT