Phases of The Cardiac Action Potential
The standard model used to understand the cardiac action potential is the action potential of the ventricular myocyte. The action potential has 5 phases (numbered 0-4). Phase 4 is the resting membrane potential, and describes the membrane potential when the cell is not being stimulated.
Once the cell is electrically stimulated (typically by an electric current from an adjacent cell), it begins a sequence of actions involving the influx and efflux of multiple cations and anions that together produce the action potential of the cell, propagating the electrical stimulation to the cells that lie adjacent to it. In this fashion, an electrical stimulation is conducted from one cell to all the cells that are adjacent to it, to all the cells of the heart.
Read more about this topic: Cardiac Action Potential
Famous quotes containing the words phases of, phases, action and/or potential:
“That man is to be pitied who cannot enjoy social intercourse without eating and drinking. The lowest orders, it is true, cannot imagine a cheerful assembly without the attractions of the table, and this reflection alone should induce all who aim at intellectual culture to endeavor to avoid placing the choicest phases of social life on such a basis.”
—Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)
“That man is to be pitied who cannot enjoy social intercourse without eating and drinking. The lowest orders, it is true, cannot imagine a cheerful assembly without the attractions of the table, and this reflection alone should induce all who aim at intellectual culture to endeavor to avoid placing the choicest phases of social life on such a basis.”
—Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)
“It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.”
—Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)
“And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)