Gap Junctions, Dendrites and Resonances: A Recipe for Tuning Network Dynamics

Gap junctions, also referred to as electrical synapses, are expressed along the entire central nervous system and are important in mediating various brain rhythms in both normal and pathological states. These connections can form between the dendritic trees of individual cells. Many dendrites express membrane channels that confer on them a form of sub-threshold resonant dynamics. To obtain insight into the modulatory role of gap junctions in tuning networks of resonant dendritic trees, we generalise the “sum-over-trips” formalism for calculating the response function of a single branching dendrite to a gap junctionally coupled network. Each cell in the network is modelled by a soma connected to an arbitrary structure of dendrites with resonant membrane. The network is treated as a single extended tree structure with dendro-dendritic gap junction coupling. We present the generalised “sum-over-trips” rules for constructing the network response function in terms of a set of coefficients defined at special branching, somatic and gap-junctional nodes. Applying this framework to a two-cell network, we construct compact closed form solutions for the network response function in the Laplace (frequency) domain and study how a preferred frequency in each soma depends on the location and strength of the gap junction.