In 1963, the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine was awarded to Sir Alan Hodgkin and Sir Andrew Huxley for their pioneering study on the squid giant axon. The squid, with its extremely large axon (up to 1mm diameter) and minimal conductance, allowed them to perform their experiments. In 1952, Hodgkin and Huxley wrote five consecutive papers that explained how the movement of ions in a nerve cell occur during an action potential. The first paper examined the function of the neuron membrane under normal conditions and outlined the basic experimental method universal to each of their subsequent studies. The second paper examined the effects of changes in sodium concentration on the action potential as well as the resolution of the ionic current into sodium and potassium currents. The third paper examined the effect of sudden potential changes on the action potential (including the effect of sudden potential changes on the ionic conductance). The fourth paper outlined how the inactivation process reduces sodium permeability. The final paper (Hodgkin & Huxley, 1952) put together all of the information from the previous papers and turned them into a mathematical model. In order for modelling the electrical conduction in nerve cells, Hodgkin and Huxley worked on the squid giant axon. As the name suggests, the dimensions of the axon…show more content… MATLAB R2016b software was employed for simulations and the models were constructed in SIMULINK environment as interlaced subsystems using the provided building blocks. The simulations were run with MATLAB's ode45 solver with variable step size and relative tolerance of 10-3. Both model files are run through a single main script which lets the user select the stimulation modes for examining the effects of changing different
