Abstract
Refractory period (RP) plays a central role in neural signaling. Because it limits an excitable membrane's recovery time from a previous excitation, it can restrict information transmission. Classically, RP means the recovery time from an action potential (spike), and its impact to encoding has been mostly studied in spiking neurons. However, many sensory neurons do not communicate with spikes but convey information by graded potential changes. In these systems, RP can arise as an intrinsic property of their quantal micro/nanodomain sampling events, as recently revealed for quantum bumps (single photon responses) in microvillar photoreceptors. Whilst RP is directly unobservable and hard to measure, masked by the graded macroscopic response that integrates numerous quantal events, modeling can uncover its role in encoding. Here, we investigate computationally how RP can affect encoding of graded neural responses. Simulations in a simple stochastic process model for a fly photoreceptor elucidate how RP can profoundly contribute to nonlinear gain control to achieve a large dynamic range.
Highlights
Refractory period (RP) determines an excitable membrane’s recovery time (Hodgkin and Huxley 1952b).During RP, the membrane patch cannot respond to external stimuli, no matter how strong these are
quantum efficiency (QE) measures the proportion of photons that are successfully transduced to quantum bumps (QBs)
We can approximate a photoreceptor’s QE by that of its single microvillus, which is the ratio between its QB rate (v) and its photon-absorption (k) rate
Summary
Refractory period (RP) determines an excitable membrane’s recovery time (Hodgkin and Huxley 1952b).During RP, the membrane patch cannot respond to external stimuli, no matter how strong these are. Physiological Reports published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of The Physiological Society and the American Physiological Society. Refractory Period Provides Nonlinear Gain Control many different stimulus patterns it can encode as different in a unit of time (Juusola et al 2007). It remains less clear whether or how RP exchanges this loss in capacity to some other encoding benefits
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