Heart Motoraeuron Dynamics of Leeches

摘要

The heartbeat of the medicinal leech consists of two intricate patterns of oscillatory behavior, which are driven by two lateral arrays of motorneurons. On one side of the animal the motorneurons oscillate synchronously, while on the other side they produce a peristaltic wave of oscillations. Then every 20 heartbeats, approximately, the two sides alternate their activity. These two rhythms, including the transitions between them, are known to be initiated by a Central Pattern Generator (CPG) network of neurons. The translation mechanism from CPG dynamics to motorneuron activity, however, is not well understood. In this work, we use symmetric systems of differential equations, accompanied with computational simulations, to investigate such mechanism.