Speaker
Dr
Anastasis Oulas
Description
Neurons in the prefrontal cortex display sustained activity in response to environmental or internal stimuli, that continues until the behavioral outcome or a reward signal arrives. Large-scale modeling studies have proposed intensive recurrence and slow excitation mediated by NMDA receptors as the mechanisms able to support the sustained excitation in these neurons. In addition, electrophysiological studies suggest that single-cell intrinsic currents also underlie the delayed excitation of prefrontal neurons. In order to study learning and memory processes, we develop detailed biophysical computational models of small neural circuits of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). We use these models in order to study the role of biophysical and anatomical mechanisms in the emergence and maintenance of sustained activity. Additionally, we dissect the contribution of different types of interneurons in this sustained activity. This computational work provides (a) some of the most realistic biophysical models of neurons in the brain which are publicly available and used by numerous labs worldwide and (b) generates interesting predictions which steer the interest of the neuroscience community and open up new avenues for experimental verifications. All of our models are developed within the open source Neuron simulation environment and were parallelized for the HPCG Infrastructure provided by HP-SEE. Benchmarks show a significant speedup when simulations are run on parallel environments.
Primary author
Mr
Georgios Kastellakis
(IMBB-FORTH)
Co-author
Dr
Yiota Poirazi
(IMBB-FORTH)
