Cell Systems Bioelectricity: How Different Intercellular Gap Junctions Could Regionalize a Multicellular Aggregate

Simple Summary Electric potential patterns across tissues are instructive for development, regeneration, and tumorigenesis because they can influence transcription, migration, and differentiation through biochemical and biomechanical downstream processes. Determining the origins of the spatial domains of distinct potential, which in turn decide anatomical features such as limbs, eyes, brain, and heart, is critical to a mature understanding of how bioelectric signaling drives morphogenesis. We studied theoretically how connexin proteins with different voltage-gated gap junction conductances can maintain multicellular regions at distinct membrane potentials. We analyzed a minimal model that i…