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Requirements for a single cell mechanism of entorhinal “grid field” activity: role of dendritic oscillators and coupling

Michiel W. H. Remme¹, Máté Lengyel² & Boris S. Gutkin³

Correspondence: (Login to view email address)

1. Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, USA
2. Computational and Biological Learning Lab, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
3. Group for Neural Theory, LNC, INSERM U960, ENS, Paris, France

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Document Type:

Poster

Date:

Received 12 June 2009 12:13 UTC; Posted 12 June 2009

Subjects:

Neuroscience

Tags:

• dendritic oscillators
• grid fields
• grid pattern
• intra-dendritic coupling
• model
• neurobiology

Abstract:

The responses of rat medial entorhinal cortical neurons form characteristic grid patterns as a function of the animal’s position. A recent model of grid fields proposes a mechanism based on intrinsic single cell properties. It relies on interference patterns emerging from multiple distinct and independent oscillations maintained in the dendritic tree of the cell. Here we examine the requirements necessary to implement this idealized mechanism in a biophysically realistic model. We find that appropriate grid field-formation by a single cell is exquisitely sensitive to intra-dendritic interactions. Mathematical analysis shows how these effects depend on properties of the dendritic oscillators and the (active) membrane segments that connect them. We provide requirements on the ion channel distributions that would be necessary for grid-fields. We implement these requirements in a compartmental model of a spiny stellate cell. We find that with realistic cell properties the intra-dendritic coupling is insufficiently weak to maintain grid field activity. Rather, the cell acts as a single oscillator as opposed to maintaining several independent oscillators. This work gives explicit requirements for a single cell implementation of grid-field activity and hints at a possible circuit level origin for grid pattern formation.

Presented at:

Society for Neuroscience 2008, 18 November 2008

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This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

How to cite this document:

Remme, Michiel, Lengyel, Máté, and Gutkin, Boris. Requirements for a single cell mechanism of entorhinal “grid field” activity: role of dendritic oscillators and coupling. Available from Nature Precedings <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2009.3338.1> (2009)

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