Effect of gating currents of ion channels on the collective spiking activity of coupled Hodgkin-Huxley neurons

Abstract

Based on the coupled stochastic Hodgkin-Huxley neurons, we numerically studied the effect of gating currents of ion channels, as well as coupling and the number of neurons, on the collective spiking rate and regularity in the coupled system. It was found, for a given coupling strength and with a relatively large number of neurons, when gating currents are applied, the collective spiking regularity decreases; meanwhile, the collective spiking rate increases, indicating that gating currents can aggravate the desynchronization of the spikings of all neurons. However, gating currents caused hardly any effect in the spiking of any individual neuron of the coupled system. This result, different from the reduction of the spiking rate by gating currents in a single neuron, provides a new insight into the effect of gating currents on the global information processing and signal transduction in real neural systems.