Calcium concentrations as well as time courses have been used to model the signaling cascades leading to changes in the strength of synaptic connections. Previous models consider the dendritic spines as uniform compartments regarding calcium signaling. However, calcium concentrations can vary drastically on distances much smaller than typical spine sizes, and downstream targets of calcium signa...

22 Activity in populations of neurons is essential for cortical function, including signaling of 23 information and signal transport. Previous methods have made advances in recording 24 activity from many neurons, but have both technical and analytical limitations. Here we 25 present an optical method, dithered random-access functional calcium imaging, to 26 record somatic calcium signals from ...

Acetylcholine (ACh) is an important modulator of learning, memory, and synaptic plasticity in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and other brain regions. Activation of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors (mAChRs) suppresses a variety of potassium currents, including sI(AHP), the calcium-activated potassium conductance primarily responsible for the slow afterhyperpolarization (AHP) that follows a tra...

Fluorescent calcium indicators are becoming increasingly popular as a means for observing the spiking activity of large neuronal populations. Unfortunately, extracting the spike train of each neuron from a raw fluorescence movie is a nontrivial problem. This work presents a fast nonnegative deconvolution filter to infer the approximately most likely spike train of each neuron, given the fluores...

Acutely dissociated cell bodies of mouse Purkinje neurons spontaneously fired action potentials at approximately 50 Hz (25 degrees C). To directly measure the ionic currents underlying spontaneous activity, we voltage-clamped the cells using prerecorded spontaneous action potentials (spike trains) as voltage commands and used ionic substitution and selective blockers to isolate individual curre...

Calcium through NMDA receptors (NMDARs) is necessary for the long-term potentiation (LTP) of synaptic strength; however, NMDARs differ in several properties that can influence the amount of calcium influx into the spine. These properties, such as sensitivity to magnesium block and conductance decay kinetics, change the receptor's response to spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP) protocols, a...

A computational model was developed to evaluate the influence of the calcium-dependent potassium conductance (gKCa), the calcium concentration in soma (varying the velocity of calcium extrusion velext and the calcium conductances in soma – gCaN and gCaP), the inclusion of a slow inactivation state variable in soma's fast sodium conductance and the conductance of the persistent sodium current in...

What is it about the dopaminergic neurones of the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc) and the cholinergic neurones of the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus (DMV) that makes them particularly prone to the neurodegenerative changes found in Parkinson’s disease? If mitochondrial oxidant stress is accepted as an important step in the pathogenesis or Parkinson’s disease, are these cell groups inhe...

We use a computational model of a hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cell to demonstrate that spine head calcium provides an instantaneous readout at each synapse of the postsynaptic weighted sum of all presynaptic activity impinging on the cell. The form of the readout is equivalent to the functions of weighted, summed inputs used in neural network learning rules. Within a dendritic layer, peak spine h...