Abstract
Neural coding through inhibitory projection pathways remains poorly understood. We analyze the transmission properties of the Purkinje cell (PC) to cerebellar nucleus (CN) pathway in a modeling study using a data set recorded in awake mice containing respiratory rate modulation. We find that inhibitory transmission from tonically active PCs can transmit a behavioral rate code with high fidelity. We parameterized the required population code in PC activity and determined that 20% of PC inputs to a full compartmental CN neuron model need to be rate-comodulated for transmission of a rate code. Rate covariance in PC inputs also accounts for the high coefficient of variation in CN spike trains, while the balance between excitation and inhibition determines spike rate and local spike train variability. Overall, our modeling study can fully account for observed spike train properties of cerebellar output in awake mice, and strongly supports rate coding in the cerebellum.
Highlights
Transmission of information through firing rate changes in populations of connected neurons is one of the most widely accepted principles of neural coding
We can show that the inhibition this neuron type receives from Purkinje cells in the cerebellar cortex is well suited to pass a detailed time course of movement control to the output of the cerebellum
The starting point of our analysis was a database of 21 Purkinje cell (PC), 11 mossy fiber (MF) and 16 cerebellar nucleus (CN) recordings
Summary
Our goal was to determine whether the spike train statistics and respiratory modulation of CN neurons can be explained from the dynamics of a biophysically realistic CN neuron model [7] and the input patterns received. We aimed to incorporate the respiration related rhythmic spike rate modulation in the PC input to CN neurons in our simulations to determine whether the recorded PC respiratory modulation (Fig 5A and 5B) can explain the recorded CN modulation (Fig 5E and 5F)
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