Climbing fiber (CF) afferents modulate the frequency and patterns of cerebellar Purkinje cell (PC) simple spike (SS) activity, but its mechanism is unclear. In the present study, we investigated the mechanisms of spontaneous CF discharge-evoked pauses and the output modulation of cerebellar PCs in urethane-anesthetized mice using in vivo whole-cell recording techniques and pharmacological metho...

Neurons use glucose to fuel glycolysis and provide substrates for mitochondrial respiration, but neurons can also use alternative fuels that bypass glycolysis and feed directly into mitochondria. To determine whether neuronal pacemaking depends on active glucose metabolism, we switched the metabolic fuel from glucose to alternative fuels, lactate or β-hydroxybutyrate, while monitoring the spont...

Abstract: Recent work has established broadband, high frequency power (50-200 Hz) in the local field potential (LFP) as an important correlate of neuronal firing rates. To better understand how the firing rates of individual neurons relate to high frequency power in the LFP, we simultaneously recorded single-neuron firing and LFPs from the brains of 20 neurosurgical patients. Analyzing data fro...

In vivo cortical neurons exhibit highly irregular spike sequences. However, the computational implications of this irregular firing with respect to neural codings are not yet fully understood. Recently, we formulated neuronal firing as a stochastic process to translate the firing rate determined by synaptic input into an irregular sequence of inter-spike intervals (ISIs). We previously determin...

Many experimental studies of neural coding rely on a statistical interpretation of the theoretical notion of the rate at which a neuron fires spikes. For example, neuroscientists often ask, "Does a population of neurons exhibit more synchronous spiking than one would expect from the covariability of their instantaneous firing rates?" For another example, "How much of a neuron's observed spiking...

In this work we consider a periodically forced generic integrate-and-fire model with a unique attracting equilibrium in the subthreshold dynamics and study the dependence of the firing-rate on the frequency of the drive. In an earlier study we have obtained rigorous results on the bifurcation structure in such systems, with emphasis on the relation between the firing-rate and the rotation numbe...

Neurons of the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) provide spatial representations critical for navigation. In this network, the periodic firing fields of grid cells act as a metric element for position. The location of the grid firing fields depends on interactions between self-motion information, geometrical properties of the environment and nonmetric contextual cues. Here, we test whether visual ...

Co-firing biomass plants are of extensive demand due to utilization of both agricultural residues (main) and natural gas (stand-by). Researchers have shown that one strategic decision in establishment of agricultural residues based plants, is location optimization problem. Moreover, mismatch between agricultural lands and biomass plants can lead to high transportation costs and related carbon d...

Daily preferential use was shown to alter physiological and mechanical properties of skeletal muscle. This study was aimed at revealing differences in the control strategy of muscle pairs in humans who show a clear preference for one hand. We compared the motor unit (MU) recruitment and firing behavior in the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscle of both hands in eight male volunteers whose ha...

PI controllers are typically used in industry for boiler firing rate control for their simplicity and ease in tuning; this is the case with the utility boilers at Syncrude Canada’s northern Alberta plant. However, instability often occurs in cases of large (load) disturbances, primarily due to firing rate limit constraints. Using a Syncrude Canada’s utility boiler as an example, we attempt to r...