Non-linear dendrites can tune neurons
| Dates: | 14 May 2014 |
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| Times: | 12:00 - 13:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Faculty of Life Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff |
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| Speaker: | Romain Caze |
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This seminar is part of the Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) Seminar Series
Abstract:
A signature of visual, auditory, and motor cortices is the presence of neurons tuned to distinct features of the environment. While neuronal tuning can be observed in most brain areas, its origin remains enigmatic, and new calcium imaging data complicate this problem. Dendritic calcium signals, in a L2/3 neuron from the mouse visual cortex, display a wide range of tunings that could be different from the neuronal tuning (Jia et al 2010). To elucidate this observation we use multi-compartmental models of increasing complexity, from a binary to a realistic biophysical model of L2/3 neuron. These models possess non-linear dendritic subunits inside which the result of multiple excitatory inputs is smaller than their arithmetic sum. While dendritic non-linear subunits are ad-hoc in the binary model, non-linearities in the realistic model come from the passive saturation of synaptic currents. Because of these non-linearities our neuron models are scatter sensitive: the somatic membrane voltage is higher when presynaptic inputs target different dendrites than when they target a single dendrite. This spatial bias in synaptic integration is, in our models, the origin of neuronal tuning. Indeed, assemblies of presynaptic inputs encode the stimulus property through an increase in correlation or activity, and only the assembly that encodes the preferred stimulus targets different dendrites. Assemblies coding for the non-preferred stimuli target single dendrites, explaining the wide range of observed tunings and the possible difference between dendritic and somatic tuning. We thus propose, in accordance with the latest experimental observations, that non-linear integration in dendrites can generate neuronal tuning independently of the coding regime.
Speaker
Romain Caze
Role: Research Fellow
Organisation: Imperial College, London
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