Summary

Proceedings of the 2012 International Symposium on Nonlinear Theory and its Applications

2012

Session Number:C2L-B

Session:

Number:640

Spike Propagation in Excitable Systems Enhanced by Membrane-Potential-Dependent Noise

Gonzalez-Carabarin Lizeth,  Tetsuya Asai,  Masato Motomura,  

pp.640-643

Publication Date:

Online ISSN:2188-5079

DOI:10.15248/proc.1.640

PDF download (459.2KB)

Until a few decades ago, noise was considered to be a factor that was responsible for the degradation in the performance of any electrical system, and indeed, there has been much research on the suppression of noisy signals. However, in the early 70's, a new phenomenon was observed in many physical as well as biological systems in which noise actually enhanced their performance under certain circumstances. Recently, Ochab-Marcinek et al. demonstrated that in myelinated axons having several intermediate nodes (known as Ranvier nodes), spike transmission initiated by sub-threshold stimuli can be enhanced by exploiting internal random fluctuations. Inspired by this work, we investigated how noise and its fluctuations enhance the performance of spike transmission in serially-connected electrically receiving sub-threshold inputs. Moreover, we also explored the effect of a membrane-potential-dependent dynamic noise as an alternative to avoiding spontaneous spike generation due to large noise fluctuations. Electrical simulations showed more than 20% increase in the transmission rate.

[1] Ochab-Marcinek A. et al., ”Noise-assisted spike propagation in myelinated neurons” Phys. Rev. E, 79, 011904, 2009.

[2] L. Gammaitoni, et al., ”Stochastic Resonance” Rev. Mod. Phys. 70, 225, 1998.

[3] Pei X, Wilkens LA., Moss F., ”Light enhances hydrodynamic signaling in the multimodal caudal photoreceptor interneurons of the crayfish.”, J Neurophysiol., Vol. 76, 1996.

[4] Collins, J. J., Imhoff, T. T. and Grigg P. J. ”Noiseenhanced tactile sensation”, Nature, Vol. 383, pp. 770, 1996.

[5] Minato Kawaguchi, et al., ”Stochastic Resonance Can Enhance Information Transmission in Neural Networks” IEEE Trans Biomed Eng 58:1950-8, 2011.

[6] Peter N. Steinmetz , Amit Manwani , Christof Koch , Michael London and Idan Segev, ”Subthreshold Voltage Noise Due to Channel Fluctuations in Active Neuronal Membranes ”, J. Comput. Neurosci, Vol. 9, pp. 133-148, 1999.