title: Amplitude and frequency dependence of spike timing: implications for dynamic regulation.
abstract: The spike-time reliability of motoneurons in the Aplysia buccal motor ganglion was studied as a function of the frequency content and the relative amplitude of the fluctuations in the neuronal input, calculated as the coefficient of variation (CV). Measurements of spike-time reliability to sinusoidal and aperiodic inputs, as well as simulations of a noisy leaky integrate-and-fire neuron stimulated by spike trains drawn from a periodically modulated process, demonstrate that there are three qualitatively different CV-dependent mechanisms that determine reliability: noise-dominated (CV < 0.05 for Aplysia motoneurons) where spike timing is unreliable regardless of frequency content; resonance-dominated (CV approximately 0.05-0.25) where reliability is reduced by removal of input frequencies equal to motoneuron firing rate; and amplitude-dominated (CV >0.35) where reliability depends on input frequencies greater than motoneuron firing rate. In the resonance-dominated regime, changes in the activity of the presynaptic inhibitory interneuron B4/5 alter motoneuron spike-time reliability. The increases or decreases in reliability occur coincident with small changes in motoneuron spiking rate due to changes in interneuron activity. Injection of a hyperpolarizing current into the motoneuron reproduces the interneuron-induced changes in reliability. The rate-dependent changes in reliability can be understood from the phase-locking properties of regularly spiking motoneurons to periodic inputs. Our observations demonstrate that the ability of a neuron to support a spike-time code can be actively controlled by varying the properties of the neuron and its input.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60615, USA.
authors.forename: John D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Hunter
authors.forename: John G
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Milton
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials; D000818:Animals; D001048:Aplysia; D007395:Interneurons; D009046:Motor Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D009433:Neural Inhibition; D016012:Poisson Distribution; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D009435:Synaptic Transmission