Department of Mathematics, South China University of Technology, 510640, Guangzhou, China.
Neurol Sci. 2013 Sep;34(9):1517-22. doi: 10.1007/s10072-012-1270-z. Epub 2012 Dec 18.
Pyramidal neurons in the electrosensory lateral line lobe (ELL) of weakly electric fish activate in an environment of time-varying electric fields, which are generated by the fish itself, while how these pyramidal neurons would behave or what kinds of firing patterns these neurons would produce under different electric fields is still unclear. In this research, the firing behaviors of ELL pyramidal neuron under DC and AC electric field stimulus are investigated in a two-compartment neuron model. By means of numerical simulations we show that firing patterns of the model ELL pyramidal neuron are much diverse under different values of DC electric field, and neuronal spike frequency exhibits a monotone decreasing trend with the linearly increased DC fields, moreover, the transition mode between these firing patterns with the variation of DC electric fields demonstrates an explicit periodic route. While for AC electric fields, neuronal firing frequency periodically transforms with the increase of AC frequency, particularly, a special transition pattern (from multi-period bursting to spiking) repeatedly appears with the change of AC frequency. Our simulation results indicate that ELL pyramidal neurons fire dynamically under the time-varying electric fields, the diversity of firing patterns and their periodic transition modes may imply the potential roles of these dynamical firings in the coding strategy of sensory information processing.
电鳐的侧线电感觉叶中的锥体神经元在时变电场的环境中激活，这些电场是由鱼本身产生的，而这些锥体神经元在不同电场下的行为或产生的放电模式是什么仍然不清楚。在这项研究中，在双室神经元模型中研究了 ELL 锥体神经元在直流和交流电场刺激下的放电行为。通过数值模拟，我们表明，在不同的直流电场值下，模型 ELL 锥体神经元的放电模式非常多样，神经元的脉冲频率随着直流场的线性增加呈单调递减趋势，此外，这些放电模式随直流电场变化的转换模式表现出明显的周期性路径。而对于交流电场，神经元的放电频率随交流频率的增加而周期性地变化，特别是，随着交流频率的变化，会反复出现一种特殊的转换模式（从多周期爆发到脉冲）。我们的模拟结果表明，ELL 锥体神经元在时变电场下动态放电，放电模式的多样性及其周期性转换模式可能暗示了这些动态放电在感觉信息处理编码策略中的潜在作用。
