6,119 research outputs found
Timescales of spike-train correlation for neural oscillators with common drive
We examine the effect of the phase-resetting curve (PRC) on the transfer of
correlated input signals into correlated output spikes in a class of neural
models receiving noisy, super-threshold stimulation. We use linear response
theory to approximate the spike correlation coefficient in terms of moments of
the associated exit time problem, and contrast the results for Type I vs. Type
II models and across the different timescales over which spike correlations can
be assessed. We find that, on long timescales, Type I oscillators transfer
correlations much more efficiently than Type II oscillators. On short
timescales this trend reverses, with the relative efficiency switching at a
timescale that depends on the mean and standard deviation of input currents.
This switch occurs over timescales that could be exploited by downstream
circuits
Phase resetting reveals network dynamics underlying a bacterial cell cycle
Genomic and proteomic methods yield networks of biological regulatory
interactions but do not provide direct insight into how those interactions are
organized into functional modules, or how information flows from one module to
another. In this work we introduce an approach that provides this complementary
information and apply it to the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus, a paradigm
for cell-cycle control. Operationally, we use an inducible promoter to express
the essential transcriptional regulatory gene ctrA in a periodic, pulsed
fashion. This chemical perturbation causes the population of cells to divide
synchronously, and we use the resulting advance or delay of the division times
of single cells to construct a phase resetting curve. We find that delay is
strongly favored over advance. This finding is surprising since it does not
follow from the temporal expression profile of CtrA and, in turn, simulations
of existing network models. We propose a phenomenological model that suggests
that the cell-cycle network comprises two distinct functional modules that
oscillate autonomously and couple in a highly asymmetric fashion. These
features collectively provide a new mechanism for tight temporal control of the
cell cycle in C. crescentus. We discuss how the procedure can serve as the
basis for a general approach for probing network dynamics, which we term
chemical perturbation spectroscopy (CPS)
Emergence and combinatorial accumulation of jittering regimes in spiking oscillators with delayed feedback
Interaction via pulses is common in many natural systems, especially
neuronal. In this article we study one of the simplest possible systems with
pulse interaction: a phase oscillator with delayed pulsatile feedback. When the
oscillator reaches a specific state, it emits a pulse, which returns after
propagating through a delay line. The impact of an incoming pulse is described
by the oscillator's phase reset curve (PRC). In such a system we discover an
unexpected phenomenon: for a sufficiently steep slope of the PRC, a periodic
regular spiking solution bifurcates with several multipliers crossing the unit
circle at the same parameter value. The number of such critical multipliers
increases linearly with the delay and thus may be arbitrary large. This
bifurcation is accompanied by the emergence of numerous "jittering" regimes
with non-equal interspike intervals (ISIs). Each of these regimes corresponds
to a periodic solution of the system with a period roughly proportional to the
delay. The number of different "jittering" solutions emerging at the
bifurcation point increases exponentially with the delay. We describe the
combinatorial mechanism that underlies the emergence of such a variety of
solutions. In particular, we show how a periodic solution exhibiting several
distinct ISIs can imply the existence of multiple other solutions obtained by
rearranging of these ISIs. We show that the theoretical results for phase
oscillators accurately predict the behavior of an experimentally implemented
electronic oscillator with pulsatile feedback
A comparison of methods to determine neuronal phase-response curves
The phase-response curve (PRC) is an important tool to determine the
excitability type of single neurons which reveals consequences for their
synchronizing properties. We review five methods to compute the PRC from both
model data and experimental data and compare the numerically obtained results
from each method. The main difference between the methods lies in the
reliability which is influenced by the fluctuations in the spiking data and the
number of spikes available for analysis. We discuss the significance of our
results and provide guidelines to choose the best method based on the available
data.Comment: PDFLatex, 16 pages, 7 figures
- …