I'm conducting a quick preliminary study of the dynamics of an array of
olfactory neurons, including representatives of all the classes
(periglomerular, tufted/mitral, granule cell, short axon) involved in the
mammalian olfactory bulb. Currently available realistic whole-neuron
models seem to range in one step from Bartlett Mel's excitable dendritic
tree with some 500 isopotential compartments to the single-compartment
leaky integrate-and-fire models investigated by Christof Koch and his
colleagues. These models have two major weaknesses for my study:
inadequate representation of dendro-dendritic interactions (I'm
particularly interested in the H connections involving periglomerular
cells and tufted/mitral cells) and a poor scale of compartmentalization.
The structure of the tufted/mitral cell seems to support a stochastic
resonance model operating within an array of several thousand interacting
neurons, but investigation of that idea requires a simplified
representation of individual neurons as a computationally feasible
aggregation of a small number (3-10) of neuronal compartments. I have
supercomputer access, but not enough for a detailed simulation. I don't
want to use Neuron unless I have to. Can someone point me towards a
jump-start?
--
Harry Erwin
Internet: herwin at gmu.edu
