Investigating mechanisms of heterogeneities in sensory neural responses
I’m a PhD student in Department of Physiology at McGill University under supervision of Dr Khadra and Dr Chacron. My research involves studying mechanisms of synchronization in pyramidal sensory neurons. Synchronization plays an important role in population coding that gives rise to perception and behavior since it carries information about the natural stimuli. My goal is developing a mathematical model of pyramidal cells that helps us to study the functional role of intrinsic phyiological elements at the single cell level, as well as extracelullar parameters on the burst firing pattern of individual neurons and the induced synchrony through burst across neural populations.
Investigating mechanisms of heterogeneities in sensory neural responses
While neural heterogeneities have been observed ubiquitously across systems and species, their functional role has remained unclear to this date. Here, to gain understanding of what mechanisms are responsible for observed heterogeneities in sensory neural populations, we tested whether a simplified mathematical model could correctly reproduce experimental data and, if so, which model parameters primarily account for observed heterogeneities. Our computational model revealed that Calcium-activated potassium (SK) channel, Calcium dynamic, and the sothcastic characteristic of synaptic input play important role in causing the heterogeneity observed experimentally among neural responses at the single cell level. Our results thus provide a new methodology that can be used to better understand the functional aspects of mechanisms mediating heterogeneities seen experimentally and, importantly, make experimentally testable predictions.