Emergence and Maintenance of Excitability: Kinetics over Structure

Emergence and maintenance of excitability is often phrased in terms of arriving at and remaining about a manifold of 'solutions' embedded in a high dimensional parameter space. Alongside studies that extend traditional focus on control-based regulation of structural parameters (channel densities), there is a budding interest in self-organization of kinetic parameters. In this picture, ionic channels are continually forced by activity in-and-out of a large pool of states not available for the mechanism of excitability. The process, acting on expressed structure, provides a bed for generation of a spectrum of excitability modes. Driven by microscopic fluctuations over a broad range of temporal scales, self-organization of kinetic parameters extends the metaphors and tools used in the study of development of excitability.