ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neural Circuits
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fncir.2025.1545031
This article is part of the Research TopicBridging Computation, Biophysics, Medicine, and Engineering in Neural CircuitsView all 13 articles
A Concise Mathematical Description of Signal Transformations across the Hippocampal apical CA3 to CA1 dendritic response
Provisionally accepted
Sandra Gattas1,2*
Aliza Le3
Javad Karimi Abadchi4Ben Pruess3Yanning Shen5A Lee Swindlehurst5
Michael A Yassa3,6,7
Gary Lynch3- 1Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, United States
- 2Department of Neurosurgery, School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
- 3Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California, United States
- 4Douglas Research Center, McGill University, Montreal, Ontario, Canada
- 5Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Samueli School of Engineering, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California, United States
- 6Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California, United States
- 7Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, School of Biological Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California, United States
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Abstract: The synapse is the fundamental unit of communication in the nervous system. Determining how information is transferred across the synaptic interface is one of the most complex endeavors in neuroscience, owing to the large number of contributing factors and events. An approach to solving this problem involves collapsing across these complexities to derive concise mathematical formulas that fully capture the governing dynamics of synaptic transmission. We investigated the feasibility of deriving such a formula – an input-output transformation function for the CA3 to CA1 node of the hippocampus -- using the Volterra expansion technique for nonlinear system identification. The timecourse of the fEPSP in the apical dendrites of mouse brain slices was described with >94% accuracy by a 2nd order equation that captured the linear and nonlinear influence of past inputs on current outputs. This function generalized to cases not included in its derivation and uncovered previously undetected timing rules. The basal dendrites expressed a substantially different transfer function and evidence was obtained that, unlike the apical system, a 3rd order system or higher will be needed for complete characterization. At scale, the approach will also provide information needed for the construction of biologically realistic models of brain networks.
Keywords: Hippocampus, CA3, CA1, Volterra series, System idenfication
Received: 13 Dec 2024; Accepted: 29 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gattas, Le, Abadchi, Pruess, Shen, Swindlehurst, Yassa and Lynch. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sandra Gattas, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, United States
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