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Original Research Article
Inhibition potentiates the synchronizing action of electrical synapses

1  Laboratoire de Neurophysique et Physiologie, CNRS, UMR 8119, Université Paris Descartes, France
2  Department of Physiology and Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
3  Comisión Nacional de Energia Atómica and CONICET, Centro Atómico Bariloche and Instituto Balseiro, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Argentina
4  Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, The Hebrew University, Israel


In vivo and in vitro experimental studies have found that blocking electrical interactions connecting GABAergic interneurons reduces oscillatory activity in the γ range in cortex. However, recent theoretical works have shown that the ability of electrical synapses to promote or impede synchrony, when alone, depends on their location on the dendritic tree of the neurons, the intrinsic properties of the neurons and the connectivity of the network. The goal of the present paper is to show that this versatility in the synchronizing ability of electrical synapses is greatly reduced when the neurons also interact via inhibition. To this end, we study a model network comprising two-compartment conductance-based neurons interacting with both types of synapses. We investigate the effect of electrical synapses on the dynamical state of the network as a function of the strength of the inhibition. We find that for weak inhibition, electrical synapses reinforce inhibition-generated synchrony only if they promote synchrony when they are alone. In contrast, when inhibition is sufficiently strong, electrical synapses improve synchrony even if when acting alone they would stabilize asynchronous firing. We clarify the mechanism underlying this cooperative interplay between electrical and inhibitory synapses. We show that it is relevant in two physiologically observed regimes: spike-to-spike synchrony, where neurons fire at almost every cycle of the population oscillations, and stochastic synchrony, where neurons fire irregularly and at a rate which is substantially lower than the frequency of the global population rhythm.

Keywords: gap-junction, inhibitory interneurons, cortical dynamics, network model, synchrony, gamma oscillations

Citation: Pfeuty B, Golomb D, Mato G and Hansel D (2007) Inhibition potentiates the synchronizing action of electrical synapses. Front. Comput. Neurosci. (2007) 1:8. doi:10.3389/neuro.10.008.2007

Received: 21 September 2007; paper pending published: 11 October 2007; accepted: 15 October 2007; published online: 02 November 2007.

Edited by: 
Misha Tsodyks, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel

Reviewed by: 
Udo Ernst, University of Bremen, Germany
Mate Lengyel, Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study, Hungary

Copyright: © 2007 Pfeuty, Golomb, Mato and Hansel. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence: David Hansel, Laboratoire de Neurophysique et Physiologie and CNRS, UMR 8119, Université Paris Descartes, 45 rue des Saints Pères, 75270 Paris Cedex 06, France. e-mail: david.hansel@biomedicale.univ-paris5.fr
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