User reported issue: gated channel names, sodium vs potassium leakage rate

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript
Domain
frontend, web-dev

Research direction

Start with the Neuron simulation at the linked HTML5 URL and inspect how the channel labels and sodium/potassium leakage animation are represented. Done means the labels distinguish voltage-gated channels from ligand-gated channels and the animation reflects the reported difference in leakage rates.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

type:user-feedback

Hello, I am a faculty member at the University of Utah. I would like to use your website for the course I teach, Biology 3320, Comparative Physiology. https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/neuron/latest/neuron_en.html
I very much appreciate your effort in building such a website and sharing it with the public. However, as of now, I cannot use it because of blatant inaccuracy.

First, voltage-gated channels are labeled as "sodium-gated" and "potassium-gated" channels, as if they are opened when sodium and potassium bind to the channel. If you ask any neuroscience faculty at your institution, they will tell you that voltage-gated channels are very different from ligand-gated channels, which the misnomer suggests.

Second, the animation makes it look like sodium and potassium leak at a similar rate, but this is far from accurate. Potassium leaks significantly more than sodium, and that is an important point for learning neuroscience.

Please correct these errors. Thank you.

Dominant language
JavaScript
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1
Forks
3
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