README

In this folder you'll find the files to re-generate Eyal et al. 2016, ELIFE, Fig 3נ.
contact guy.eyal@mail.huji.ac.il

This figure quantify how many excitatory synapses should be simultaneously activated for initiating a somatic Na+ spike HL2/3 PCs models.
Two cases are tested - Model with Cm value of 0.45 uF/cm2 and model with cm of 0.9 uF/cm2. More details about the models can be found in Eyal et al.

The synapses were randomly distributed over the modeled HL2/3 dendrites and simultaneously activated. With Cm = 0.45 μF/cm2, about 100 excitatory synapses were required for generating a somatic spike with 50% probability, whereas about 170 synapses were required with Cm = 0.9 μF/cm2. The lower Cm value as found in HL2/3 pyramidal cells both improved synaptic transfer from dendrites to soma (larger EPSPs and reduced dendritic delay) and also reduced the number of synapses required to fire a somatic/axonal spike, thus compensating for the increase in the size of the dendritic tree in human neocortex.

The code in this folder tests what is the chance to generate a spike in each one of the models as function of how many synapses are activated. 
We have tested the case for any value of synapses between 0 and 300. 

To re-run the full experiment one may need parallel environment as each model was ran for 1000 randomizations for each number of synapses.

To re-create the full results run:
1. run_cm09.py 
2. run_cm045.py

Each of them will use your parallel environment to run 300 scripts (300 values of number of synapses per model) with 1000 different randomizations.

One case of such run is already supplied in this folder under DIST_045_SYNC and DIST_09_SYNC
To compare the results run compare fig_3b.py

In case you don't have parallel environment, you can still run the demos. The demos run one simulation in each of the models. The demos distribute 120 synapses around the tree and activate them. While in the first case where Cm =0.9, 120 synapses create EPSP that does not pass the threshold, in the second case (Cm = 0.45), 120 synapses do create a spike:
1.  demo_CM09_120_syns.py
2.  demo_CM045_120_syns.py

