%A Marom,Shimon %D 2009 %J Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience %C %F %G English %K adaptation,complex adaptation,excitability,graceful adaptation,Inactivation,ionic channel,logistic equation,Population Dynamics %Q %R 10.3389/neuro.10.002.2009 %W %L %M %P %7 %8 2009-February-10 %9 Original Research %+ Prof Shimon Marom,Technion - Israel Institute of Technology,Department of Physiology in the Faculty of Medicine, and the Network Biology Research Laboratories,Haifa,Israel,marom@technion.ac.il %# %! Adaptive rates %* %< %T Adaptive transition rates in excitable membranes %U https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/neuro.10.002.2009 %V 3 %0 JOURNAL ARTICLE %@ 1662-5188 %X Adaptation of activity in excitable membranes occurs over a wide range of timescales. Standard computational approaches handle this wide temporal range in terms of multiple states and related reaction rates emanating from the complexity of ionic channels. The study described here takes a different (perhaps complementary) approach, by interpreting ion channel kinetics in terms of population dynamics. I show that adaptation in excitable membranes is reducible to a simple Logistic-like equation in which the essential non-linearity is replaced by a feedback loop between the history of activation and an adaptive transition rate that is sensitive to a single dimension of the space of inactive states. This physiologically measurable dimension contributes to the stability of the system and serves as a powerful modulator of input–output relations that depends on the patterns of prior activity; an intrinsic scale free mechanism for cellular adaptation that emerges from the microscopic biophysical properties of ion channels of excitable membranes.