A Brownian model of glutamate diffusion in excitatory synapses of hippocampus.

We simulated the diffusion of glutamate, following the release of a single vesicle from a pre-synaptic terminal, in the synaptic cleft by using a Brownian diffusion model based on Langevin equations. The synaptic concentration time course and the time course of quantal excitatory post-synaptic current have been analyzed. The results showed that they depend on the number of receptors located at post-synaptic membrane. Their time course are dependent both on the total number of the post-synaptic receptors and on the eccentricity of the pre-synaptic glutamate vesicle.