Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 18, 2026

Implementing Dynamic Clamp with Synaptic and Artificial Conductances in Mouse Retinal Ganglion Cells
Published on: May 16, 2013
Calculating event-triggered average synaptic conductances from the membrane potential
Martin Pospischil1, Zuzanna Piwkowska, Michelle Rudolph
1Unité de Neurosciences Intégratives et Computationnelles, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
Abstract:
The optimal patterns of synaptic conductances for spike generation in central neurons is a subject of considerable interest. Ideally such conductance time courses should be extracted from membrane potential (V(m)) activity, but this is difficult because the nonlinear contribution of conductances to the V(m) renders their estimation from the membrane equation extremely sensitive. We outline here a solution to this problem based on a discretization of the time axis. This procedure can extract the time course of excitatory and inhibitory conductances solely from the analysis of V(m) activity. We test this method by calculating spike-triggered averages of synaptic conductances using numerical simulations of the integrate-and-fire model subject to colored conductance noise. The procedure was also tested successfully in biological cortical neurons using conductance noise injected with dynamic clamp. This method should allow the extraction of synaptic conductances from V(m) recordings in vivo.
Related Concept Videos
Integration of Synaptic Events
Action Potentials
Graded Potential
Graded potentials fall into two categories: depolarizing and hyperpolarizing. Depolarizing graded potentials typically occur when sodium (Na+) or calcium...
Action Potential
Membrane potential in neurons
Neurons typically have a resting membrane potential of about -70 millivolts (mV). When they receive...
Action Potential
Membrane potential in neurons
Neurons typically have a resting membrane potential of about -70 millivolts (mV). When they receive...
The Role of Ion Channels in Neuronal Computation
Sometimes a single EPSP is strong enough to induce an action potential in the postsynaptic neuron. However, multiple presynaptic inputs must often create EPSPs around the same time for the postsynaptic neuron to be sufficiently depolarized to fire an action potential.

