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Neuronal Transmission of Subthreshold Periodic Stimuli Via Symbolic Spike Patterns

We study how sensory neurons detect and transmit a weak external stimulus. We use the FitzHugh–Nagumo model to simulate the neuronal activity. We consider a sub-threshold stimulus, i.e., the stimulus is below the threshold needed for triggering action potentials (spikes). However, in the presence of...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Masoliver, Maria, Masoller, Cristina
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7517018/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33286297
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22050524
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author Masoliver, Maria
Masoller, Cristina
author_facet Masoliver, Maria
Masoller, Cristina
author_sort Masoliver, Maria
collection PubMed
description We study how sensory neurons detect and transmit a weak external stimulus. We use the FitzHugh–Nagumo model to simulate the neuronal activity. We consider a sub-threshold stimulus, i.e., the stimulus is below the threshold needed for triggering action potentials (spikes). However, in the presence of noise the neuron that perceives the stimulus fires a sequence of action potentials (a spike train) that carries the stimulus’ information. To yield light on how the stimulus’ information can be encoded and transmitted, we consider the simplest case of two coupled neurons, such that one neuron (referred to as neuron 1) perceives a subthreshold periodic signal but the second neuron (neuron 2) does not perceive the signal. We show that, for appropriate coupling and noise strengths, both neurons fire spike trains that have symbolic patterns (defined by the temporal structure of the inter-spike intervals), whose frequencies of occurrence depend on the signal’s amplitude and period, and are similar for both neurons. In this way, the signal information encoded in the spike train of neuron 1 propagates to the spike train of neuron 2. Our results suggest that sensory neurons can exploit the presence of neural noise to fire spike trains where the information of a subthreshold stimulus is encoded in over expressed and/or in less expressed symbolic patterns.
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spelling pubmed-75170182020-11-09 Neuronal Transmission of Subthreshold Periodic Stimuli Via Symbolic Spike Patterns Masoliver, Maria Masoller, Cristina Entropy (Basel) Article We study how sensory neurons detect and transmit a weak external stimulus. We use the FitzHugh–Nagumo model to simulate the neuronal activity. We consider a sub-threshold stimulus, i.e., the stimulus is below the threshold needed for triggering action potentials (spikes). However, in the presence of noise the neuron that perceives the stimulus fires a sequence of action potentials (a spike train) that carries the stimulus’ information. To yield light on how the stimulus’ information can be encoded and transmitted, we consider the simplest case of two coupled neurons, such that one neuron (referred to as neuron 1) perceives a subthreshold periodic signal but the second neuron (neuron 2) does not perceive the signal. We show that, for appropriate coupling and noise strengths, both neurons fire spike trains that have symbolic patterns (defined by the temporal structure of the inter-spike intervals), whose frequencies of occurrence depend on the signal’s amplitude and period, and are similar for both neurons. In this way, the signal information encoded in the spike train of neuron 1 propagates to the spike train of neuron 2. Our results suggest that sensory neurons can exploit the presence of neural noise to fire spike trains where the information of a subthreshold stimulus is encoded in over expressed and/or in less expressed symbolic patterns. MDPI 2020-05-05 /pmc/articles/PMC7517018/ /pubmed/33286297 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22050524 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Masoliver, Maria
Masoller, Cristina
Neuronal Transmission of Subthreshold Periodic Stimuli Via Symbolic Spike Patterns
title Neuronal Transmission of Subthreshold Periodic Stimuli Via Symbolic Spike Patterns
title_full Neuronal Transmission of Subthreshold Periodic Stimuli Via Symbolic Spike Patterns
title_fullStr Neuronal Transmission of Subthreshold Periodic Stimuli Via Symbolic Spike Patterns
title_full_unstemmed Neuronal Transmission of Subthreshold Periodic Stimuli Via Symbolic Spike Patterns
title_short Neuronal Transmission of Subthreshold Periodic Stimuli Via Symbolic Spike Patterns
title_sort neuronal transmission of subthreshold periodic stimuli via symbolic spike patterns
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7517018/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33286297
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22050524
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