Cancelling redundant input in ELL pyramidal cells (Bol et al. 2011)

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The paper investigates the property of the electrosensory lateral line lobe (ELL) of the brain of weakly electric fish to cancel predictable stimuli. Electroreceptors on the skin encode all signals in their firing activity, but superficial pyramidal (SP) cells in the ELL that receive this feedforward input do not respond to constant sinusoidal signals. This cancellation putatively occurs using a network of feedback delay lines and burst-induced synaptic plasticity between the delay lines and the SP cell that learns to cancel the redundant input. Biologically, the delay lines are parallel fibres from cerebellar-like granule cells in the eminentia granularis posterior. A model of this network (e.g. electroreceptors, SP cells, delay lines and burst-induced plasticity) was constructed to test whether the current knowledge of how the network operates is sufficient to cancel redundant stimuli.
1 . Bol K, Marsat G, Harvey-Girard E, Longtin A, Maler L (2011) Frequency-tuned cerebellar channels and burst-induced LTD lead to the cancellation of redundant sensory inputs. J Neurosci 31:11028-38 [PubMed]
Brain Region(s)/Organism: Cerebellum;
Cell Type(s): ELL pyramidal cell;
Gap Junctions:
Simulation Environment: C or C++ program; MATLAB;
Model Concept(s): Dendritic Action Potentials; Bursting; Active Dendrites; Synaptic Plasticity; Long-term Synaptic Plasticity; Learning; Unsupervised Learning; STDP; Biofeedback; Noise Sensitivity;
Implementer(s): Bol, Kieran [kieran_bol at];
This is a model of the ELL circuitry in weakly electric fish
(A. leptorynchus) and how it cancels redundant input using the
indirect feedback pathway (i.e. cerebellar-like granule cells) and a
burst-dependent learning rule as described in this paper:

Frequency-Tuned Cerebellar Channels and Burst-Induced LTD Lead to the
Cancellation of Redundant Sensory Inputs. J Neurosci 31:11028-38

The ELL model is presented in 2 formats here:

In a MATLAB format (CLSglobal.m) with an associated MEX file

And completely in C format (CLSglobal.c, LIFDAPC.c and

THe MATLAB format was constructed first but the MEX file type (which
requires installing within MATLAB a C compiler and compiling
LIFDAPmatlab.c within MATLAB) can be difficult to implement on some

MATLAB INSTALLED, type: mex LIFDAPmatlab.c Then run CLSglobal.m

For the C code, one will need to compile the code using a C compiler.

The inputs to both are the frequency of the redundant stimulus and
whether the feedback pathway is active or not (1 or 0, respectively).

The output of both are the firing times as a function of the phase of
the input stimulus (i.e. a post-stimulus time histogram), the
interspike interval histogram up to 200ms, the average firing rate,
the average 2-spike burst rate, the average 4-spike burst rate, and
the average weight value.

Also included (although one will have to uncomment some code) are 2
different ways to model reduced granule cell firing activity after
10Hz - either by decreasing the learning rate, eta, or the feedback
strength, Lambda.

E-mail me at, or Andre Longtin at if you have trouble implementing the code.

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