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The domain of neuronal firing on a plane of input current and conductance

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Abstract

The activation of neurotransmitter receptors increases the current flow and membrane conductance and thus controls the firing rate of a neuron. In the present work, we justified the two-dimensional representation of a neuronal input by voltage-independent current and conductance and obtained experimentally and numerically a complete input-output (I/O) function. The dependence of the steady-state firing rate on the input current and conductance was studied as a two-parameter I/O function. We employed the dynamic patch clamp technique in slices to get this dependence for the whole domain of two input signals that evoke stationary spike trains in a single neuron (Ω-domain). As found, the Ω-domain is finite and an additional conductance decreases the range of spike-evoking currents. The I/O function has been reproduced in a Hodgkin-Huxley-like model. Among the simulated effects of different factors on the I/O function, including passive and active membrane properties, external conditions and input signal properties, the most interesting were: the shift of the right boundary of the Ω-domain (corresponding to the exCitation block) leftwards due to the decrease of the maximal potassium conductance; and the reduction of the Ω-domain by the decrease of the maximal sodium concentration. As found in experiments and simulations, the Ω-domain is reduced by the decrease of extracellular sodium concentration, by cooling, and by adding slow potassium currents providing interspike interval adaptation; the Ω-domain height is increased by adding color noise. Our modeling data provided a generalization of I/O dependencies that is consistent with previous studies and our experiments. Our results suggest that both current flow and membrane conductance should be taken into account when determining neuronal firing activity.

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Acknowledgments

The reported study was supported by RFBR, research projects 13-04-00244 to K.Kh.K., 15-04-06234 to E.Yu.S., 14-04-00413 and 15-34-20514 to A.V.Z.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there search was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Politekhnicheskaya str., 26, 194021, St.-Petersburg, Russia

    E. Yu. Smirnova & A. V. Chizhov

  2. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

    A. V. Zaitsev, K. Kh. Kim & A. V. Chizhov

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  1. E. Yu. Smirnova
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  2. A. V. Zaitsev
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  3. K. Kh. Kim
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  4. A. V. Chizhov
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Correspondence to E. Yu. Smirnova.

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Smirnova, E.Y., Zaitsev, A.V., Kim, K.K. et al. The domain of neuronal firing on a plane of input current and conductance. J Comput Neurosci 39, 217–233 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10827-015-0573-5

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