......................................................................

NJIT Mathematical Biology Seminar

Tuesday, February 23, 2009, 4:00pm
Cullimore Hall 611
New Jersey Institute of Technology

......................................................................

Implementing entorhinal grid fields in biophysical neuronal models

Michiel Remme

Center for Neural Science, New York University

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. I examined the requirements necessary to implement this idealized mechanism in a biophysically realistic model. I 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. This work gives explicit requirements for a single cell implementation of grid-field activity.