The effect of environmental temperature on neuronal spiking behaviors is investigated by numerically simulating the temperature dependence of spiking threshold of the Hodgkin-Huxley neuron subject to synaptic stimulus. We find that the spiking threshold exhibits a global minimum in a specific temperature range where spike initiation needs weakest synaptic strength, which form the engineering perspective indicates the occurrence of optimal use of synaptic transmission in the nervous system. We further explore the biophysical origin of this phenomenon associated with ion channel gating kinetics and also discuss its possible biological relevance in information processing in neuronal systems.
The influence of temperature on neuronal excitability is studied by numerical simulations on the spiking threshold characteristics of bushy cells in cochlear nucleus periodically stimulated by synaptic currents. The results reveal that there is a cut-off frequency for the spiking of bushy cell in a specific temperature environment, corresponding to the existence of a critical temperature for the neuron to respond with real spikes to the synaptic stimulus of a given frequency, due to the finiteness of spike width. An optimal temperature range for neuronal spiking is also found for a specific stimulus frequency, and the temperature range span decreases with increasing stimulus frequency. These findings imply that there is a physiological temperature range which is beneficial for the information processing in auditory system. PACS numbers: 87. 19. Dd, 87. 10. +e, 87. 17. Aa, 87. 19. La Electric excitability has been attracting much attention for decades, for it is the basis of information processing and is essential to coding in neural systems. The excitability of a neuron originates from integrated effect of the kinetics [1], as well as the spatial distribution [2], of ion channels on the cellular membrane in proper environment, and determines the functional properties when responding to external stimulus, such as the frequency sensitivity [3,4] or selectivity [5], interaural time difference (ITD) sensitivity in auditory system [6], etc. Excitability and response properties of a neuron may vary in different environmental conditions of, say, temperature and pH values [7]. Recently, the influence of temperature on the excitability of rat suprachiasmatic nucleus neurons has been investigated experimentally, and the results reveal that there is a temperature-sensitive range for the neuronal activities; this may provide cues to the circadian synchronized rhythmicity [8,9]. Biophysically, temperature may influence the functioning of a neuron through the temperature dependence of various ion channel conductances and time constants of channel activation/inactivation variables [10]; hence changing temperature alters the basic properties of excitable neuron, such as the membrane potential, the input resistance, the shape and amplitude of action potentials, and the propagation of spikes [11,12,13,14]. Up to date, however, there has been little theoretical investigations of the influence of temperature on neuronal excitability in literature.Neuronal excitability can be described by the firing properties, like the spiking threshold of the neuron responding to periodic stimulus [5]. Characteristics of the spiking threshold of excitable neurons have been discussed in several studies [3,5,15,16,17], where the stimuli applied are mostly sinusoidal. More realistically, in fact, the stimulus to a post-synaptic neuron is often described by a current with alpha-function channel conductance [18], which is used in the present study. Comparable with Ref. [5], this work focuses on the effect of temperature on the spiking threshold of a...
We study the influence of membrane noise on the fluctuations of membrane voltage in the Hodgkin-Huxley neuronal system for the giant axon of squids. We find that the resting potentials of membrane patches in the absence of any external stimulus, exhibit apparent rhythmic fluctuation behaviors. The intrinsic fluctuation frequencies of membrane voltage, due to channel noise, thermal noise, or both, roughly share the same frequency ranges, despite that the fluctuations arisen from the former noise are overwhelmingly larger in amplitude than that from the latter. We also show that the rhythmic fluctuations can help enhance the encoding of weak signals within the rhythmic frequencies ranges and thus contribute positively to the information processing in the nervous system.
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