Computer simulations visualize ion flux
Tuesday, September 2, 2014 - 08:00
in Physics & Chemistry
Ion channels are involved in many physiological and pathophysiological processes throughout the human body. A young team of researchers led by pharmacologist Anna Stary-Weinzinger from the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Vienna investigated how ion flux through a voltage gated sodium ion channel works in detail. Since this process is incredibly fast (up to 100 million ions per seconds), computer simulations were performed to visualize sodium flux "in slow motion". The time consuming calculations were performed using the high performance computer cluster (VSC), which is currently the fastest computer in Austria. Recently, the results were published in PLOS Computational Biology.