Future Model Directions

Although the models presented here were able to capture the essential voltage responses of ELL granular cell following primary afferent inputs of varying latency with respect to the arrival of the EOCD, there are many additional factors to be considered, even at the single granular cell level of analysis. These include incorpation of results from future experiments testing aforementioned specific predictions of the model, such as intracellularly characterized EPSP shapes, relative ionic conductance levels, LMI interactions during the burst, and coregulation of ionic conductances over longer time epochs. Additional aspects that need to be tested for completeness include full Ca2+ handling (i.e. buffering, release from intracellular compartments, channel localization), precise synaptic locations (i.e. the present model located all synaptic inputs at the midpoint of the soma), inputs from secondary afferents (carrying latency-coded information about stimulus intensity at neighboring skin areas), effects of dendritic and axonal geometry, and differential ion channel densities at various locations on the surface of the granular cell.

Another future direction for the model is characterization of a layer of granular cells receiving input from a corresponding array of cutaneous mormyromast receptors. This would require consideration of factors not included at the single cell level, including lateral inhibition from LMI cells following stimulation of distal skin areas, degree of afferent convergence onto the granular cell layer, response pooling (i.e. convergence postsynaptic to the granular cell layer), and the effects of extracellular ion accumulation on the electrical properties of neighboring cells. This degree of specificity will only be possible once interactions at the single cell level, especially with respect to LMI interactions, are more fully understood.

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