O Miranda-Domínguez, J Gonia and T I Netoff. Firing rate control of a neuron using a linear proportional-integral controller. J. Neural Eng. (2010) Vol. 7 No. 6. Some electrophysiology experiments require periodically firing neurons. One example is when measuring a neuron’s phase response curve (PRC) where a neuron is stimulated with a synaptic input and [...]

Lin RJ, Bettencourt J, Wha Ite J, Christini DJ, Butera RJ. Real-time Experiment Interface for biological control applications. Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc (2010) vol. 1 pp. 4160-3 The Real-time Experiment Interface (RTXI) is a fast and versatile real-time biological experimentation system based on Real-Time Linux. RTXI is open source and free, can [...]

T. Kispersky, J. A. White, and H. G. Rotstein, “The Mechanism of Abrupt Transition between Theta and Hyper-Excitable Spiking Activity in Medial Entorhinal Cortex Layer II Stellate Cells,” PLoS One, vol. 5, no. 11, p. e13697, 2010. Recent studies have shown that stellate cells (SCs) of the medial entorhinal cortex become hyper-excitable in animal models [...]

J. S. Haas, T. Kreuz, A. Torcini, A. Politi, and H. D. I. Abarbanel, “Rate maintenance and resonance in the entorhinal cortex,” Eur J Neurosci, Oct. 2010. Throughout the brain, neurons encode information in fundamental units of spikes. Each spike represents the combined thresholding of synaptic inputs and intrinsic neuronal dynamics. Here, we address a [...]

Sieling, Fred H., Canavier, Carmen C, Prinz, Astrid A. Inclusion of noise in iterated firing time maps based on the phase response curve. Phys Rev E (2010) vol. 81 (6 Pt 1) pp. 061923. The infinitesimal phase response curve (PRC) of a neural oscillator to a weak input is a powerful predictor of network dynamics; [...]

M. P. Sceniak and S. L. Sabo, “Modulation of firing rate by background synaptic noise statistics in rat visual cortical neurons,” J Neurophysiol, vol. 104, no. 5, pp. 2792–2805, Aug. 2010. It has been shown previously that background synaptic noise modulates the response gain of neocortical neurons. However, the role of the statistical properties of [...]

R. Grashow and T. Brookings, “Compensation for variable intrinsic neuronal excitability by circuit-synaptic interactions,” J Neurosci, vol. 30, no. 27, pp. 9145–9156, Jul. 2010. Recent theoretical and experimental work indicates that neurons tune themselves to maintain target levels of excitation by modulating ion channel expression and synaptic strengths. As a result, functionally equivalent circuits can [...]

A. R. Hasenstaub, S. Otte, E. Callaway, and T. J. Sejnowski, “Metabolic cost as a unifying principle governing neuronal biophysics,” Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, vol. 107, no. 27, pp. 12329–12334, Jul. 2010. The brain contains an astonishing diversity of neurons, each expressing only one set of ion channels out of the billions [...]

Lobb et al. A dynamic role for GABA receptors on the firing pattern of midbrain dopaminergic neurons. J Neurophysiol (2010) vol. 104 (1) pp. 403-13 Dopaminergic neurons are subject to a significant background GABAergic input in vivo. The presence of this GABAergic background might be expected to inhibit dopaminergic neuron firing. However, dopaminergic neurons are [...]

J.-M. Goaillard, A. L. Taylor, S. R. Pulver, and E. Marder, “Slow and persistent postinhibitory rebound acts as an intrinsic short-term memory mechanism,” J Neurosci, vol. 30, no. 13, pp. 4687–4692, Mar. 2010. Many neurons exhibit postinhibitory rebound (PIR), in which neurons display enhanced excitability following inhibition. PIR can strongly influence the timing of spikes [...]