Functional structure of mitral cell dendritic tuft (Djurisic et al. 2008)

The computational modeling component of Djurisic et al. 2008 addressed two primary questions: whether amplification by active currents is necessary to explain the relatively mild attenuation suffered by tuft EPSPs spreading along the primary dendrite to the soma; what accounts for the relatively uniform peak EPSP amplitude throughout the tuft. These simulations show that passive spread from tuft to soma is sufficient to yield the low attenuation of tuft EPSPs, and that random distribution of a biologically plausible number of excitatory synapses throughout the tuft can produce the experimentally observed uniformity of depolarization.

Model Type: Neuron or other electrically excitable cell

Region(s) or Organism(s): Olfactory bulb

Cell Type(s): Olfactory bulb main mitral GLU cell

Currents: I K; I Sodium

Model Concept(s): Dendritic Action Potentials; Active Dendrites; Synaptic Integration; Olfaction

Simulation Environment: NEURON

Implementer(s): Carnevale, Ted [Ted.Carnevale at Yale.edu]

References:

Djurisic M, Popovic M, Carnevale N, Zecevic D. (2008). Functional structure of the mitral cell dendritic tuft in the rat olfactory bulb. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience. 28 [PubMed]