Vesicle-synapsin interactions modeled with Cell-DEVS

Interactions between synaptic vesicles and synapsin in a presynaptic nerve terminal were modeled using the cell-DEVS formalism. Vesicles and synapsins move randomly within the presynaptic compartment. Synapsins can bind to more than one vesicle simultaneously, causing clusters to form. Phosphorylation of synapsin reduces its affinity for vesicles, and causes the clusters to break apart. Upon dephosphosphorylation, new clusters form. Taking advantage of cell-DEVS, as opposed to traditional techniques for implementing cellular automata, the model prevents collisions between arbitrarily large clusters using transition rules restricted to a 5-cell neighborhood. Simulation results indicate that, in a qualitative sense, the behavior of vesicles and synapsin in neurons was captured.