This is the readme for the model associated with the paper Luthman J, Hoebeek FE, Maex R, Davey N, Adams R, De Zeeuw CI, Steuber V (2011) STD-dependent and independent encoding of input irregularity as spike rate in a computational model of a cerebellar nucleus neuron Cerebellum 10(4):667-82 These NEURON simulator files were contributed by Dr J Luthman. The NEURON simulator is available for free download from http://www.neuron.yale.edu Usage: Auto-launch from ModelDB after installing NEURON or download and extract this archive, compile the mod files with mknrndll (mswin, mac) or nrnivmodl (unix/linux). Start the simulation with mosinit.hoc by double clicking (mswin), or dragging and dropping onto nrngui (mac) or typing "nrngui mosinit.hoc" on the command line (unix/linux). Once the simulation has started press the DCNrun() button. After a minute (~45 seconds on a 2.4 GHz intel core duo p8600 laptop) sample data files containing spike information and traces will be written to disk: OutputDCN_soma_1s_ap.dat, OutputDCN_soma_1s_time.dat OutputDCN_soma_1s_trace.dat. where: 1) the *ap.dat file contains the action potential times in milliseconds 2) the *trace.dat file contains the membrane potential in column 1 and GABA conductance (sum of the n GABA synapses divided by n) in column 2, both in the time span of 200 to 500 ms (this time span is specified in DCN_simulation.hoc) 3) the *time.dat file contains the time points corresponding to each of the values in *trace.dat (ie, a series from 200 to 500 ms). With a little bit of editing, the code can be used to reproduce figure 2a in the article. Each data point there was created by setting (all in DCN_simulation.hoc): 1) inhibitoryHz = 60 2) useGABAsyndep = 1 (for the +STD data) and useGABAsyndep = 0 (for the -STD data) 3) noiseFractionInhSyn: from 0 to 1 in 0.2 increments, each corresponding to one of the x axis data points. (as explained in the code, the 0 setting doesn't work in some circumstances, but 1e-19 does...) The results of the figure were means of 11 seconds, from 4 to 15 seconds into the simulations.