IFIBYNE   05513
INSTITUTO DE FISIOLOGIA, BIOLOGIA MOLECULAR Y NEUROCIENCIAS
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
A computational model on the goldfish Mauthner cell
Autor/es:
TUOMO MÄKI-MARTTUNEN; MEDAN, VIOLETA
Lugar:
Québec
Reunión:
Congreso; Twenty-Third Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting CNS*2014 (CNS2014); 2014
Resumen:
Integration of multimodal information is of key importance to generate adaptive behavior. However, our understanding of how multimodal integration is implemented at the dendritic level is still scant. We address this question in the Mauthner-cell, the ?decision making element? [1] of the startle escape network of goldfish. The Mauthner-cell has two main dendritic branches, lateral and ventral, where the former receives auditory input and the latter input from the visual system [2]. Both dendrites are amenable to intracellular recording in vivo. Here, we used a Hodgkin-Huxley type of model [3-4] with three voltage-gated ionic channels (one Na+ and two K+ channels) combined with the reconstructed cell morphology to describe the cell behavior. We fitted the model parameters to intracellular recordings, where the cell is stimulated with square and ramp pulses, and responses are measured at the proximal lateral dendrite. The obtained model provides a simulation framework for studying the signal propagation in the cell. The simulation results are compared with intracellular recordings of both orthodromic and antidromic signal propagation. Preliminary results suggest that passive dendrites alone are not enough to explain the experimentally observed spatial decays in the two different directions. By contrast, we found that the application of voltage-gated channels to the model of the dendrite, even with very small maximal conductances, could lead to correctly reproducing the observed signal propagation properties. To make sure this is not an artifact of a specific complex dendrite morphology, we confirm our findings using an approximate dendritic morphology. The implications of the existence of active dendritic compartments for the cell functions are discussed.