Syntheses of spinal cord field potentials in the terrapin

A compartmental model of a terrapin motoneuron has been set up to compute membrane potential variations associated with synaptic input at different locations or with antidromic invasion. Membrane potential distributions obtained in that way were used to compute field potentials by means of a volume conduction formalism. The model was used to simulate field potentials measured in the spinal cord in response to stimulation of a muscle nerve with the intention to discriminate between different activation hypothesis for the generation of the spinal cord potential. Extracellular potentials calculated with an excitatory input distributed over the whole dorsal dendritic tree were found to give better reconstruction when compared with excitation restricted to the distal part of the dorsal dendrites, or with somatic inhibition.