Neuronal growth: a bistable stochastic process.

The fundamentally stochastic nature of neuronal growth has hardly been addressed in neuroscience. We report on the stochastic fluctuations of a neuronal growth cone's leading edge movement, the basic step in neuronal growth. Describing the edge movement as a stochastic bistable process leads to an isotropic noise parameter that is successfully used to test the model. An analysis of growth cone motility confirms the model, and predicts that linear changes of the bistable potential, as known from stochastic filtering, result in directed growth cone translocation.