Solitonic effects of the local electromagnetic field on neuronal microtubules – tubulin tail sine-Gordon solitons could control MAP attachment sites and microtubule motor protein function

Abstract

The current wisdom in the classical neural net theory holds that the only direct action of the electric field in neurons is upon voltage-gated ion channels, which open and close their gates for ions. The intraneuronal biochemical activities are thought to be modulated indirectly either by the entering in the cytoplasm ions that act as second messengers or via linked to the ion channels enzymes. In this paper we present a novel possibility for subneuronal processing of information by cytoskeletal microtubule tubulin tails and we show that the local electromagnetic field brings information that could be converted into specific protein tubulin tail conformational states. Long-range collective coherent behavior of the tubulin tails could transmit solitary waves in the form of sine-Gordon kinks, antikinks or breathers along the microtubule outer surface and the tubulin tail soliton collisions could serve as elementary computational gates that control cytoskeletal processes. The biological importance of the presented model is due to the unique biological enzymatic energase action of the tubulin tails, which is experimentally shown to control the sites of microtubule-associated protein attachment and the kinesin transport of post-Golgi vesicles.