This is a multi-compartmental simulation of a spiny stellate neuron which is stimulated by a thalamocortical (TC) and cortico-cortical (CC) inputs. No other cells are explicitly modeled; the presynaptic network activation is represented by the number of active synapses. Preferred and non –preferred thalamic directions thus correspond to larder/smaller number of TC synapses. This simulation revealed that randomly activated synapses can cooperatively trigger global NMDA spikes, which involve participation of most of the dendritic tree. Surprisingly, we found that although the voltage profile of the cell was uniform, the calcium influx was restricted to ‘hot spots’ which correspond to synaptic clusters or large conductance synapses
Reference:
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Lavzin M, Rapoport S, Polsky A, Garion L, Schiller J (2012) Nonlinear dendritic processing determines angular tuning of barrel cortex neurons in vivo. Nature 490:397-401 [PubMed]
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