Balanced Excitatory and Inhibitory Synaptic Currents Promote Efficient Coding and Metabolic Efficiency.docVIP

BalancedExcitatoryandInhibitorySynapticCurrents PromoteEfficientCodingandMetabolicEfficiency BiswaSengupta1,2*,SimonB.Laughlin3,JeremyE.Niven4* 1WellcomeTrustCentreforNeuroimaging,UniversityCollegeLondon,London,UnitedKingdom,2CentreforNeuroscience,IndianInstituteofScience,Bangalore,India, 3Department ofZoology,UniversityofCambridge,Cambridge,UnitedKingdom,4School ofLifeSciencesandCentreforComputationalNeuroscienceandRobotics, UniversityofSussex,Falmer,UnitedKingdom Abstract Abalancebetweenexcitatoryandinhibitorysynapticcurrentsisthoughttobeimportantforseveralaspectsofinformation processing in cortical neurons in vivo, including gain control, bandwidth and receptive field structure. These factors will affect thefiring rate of cortical neurons andtheir reliability, withconsequences fortheir informationcoding andenergy consumption. Yet how balanced synaptic currents contribute to the coding efficiency and energy efficiency of cortical neuronsremainsunclear.Weusedsinglecompartmentcomputationalmodelswithstochasticvoltage-gatedionchannels todeterminewhethersynapticregimesthatproducebalancedexcitatoryandinhibitorycurrentshavespecificadvantages over other input regimes. Specifically, we compared models with only excitatory synaptic inputs to those with equal excitatoryandinhibitoryconductances,andstrongerinhibitorythanexcitatoryconductances(i.e.approximatelybalanced synaptic currents). Using these models, we show that balanced synaptic currents evoke fewer spikes per second than excitatory inputs alone or equal excitatory and inhibitory conductances. However, spikes evoked by balanced synaptic inputsaremoreinformative(bits/spike),sothatspiketrainsevokedbyallthreeregimeshavesimilarinformationrates(bits/ s).Consequently,becausespikesdominatetheenergyconsumptionofourcomputationalmodels,approximatelybalanced synapticcurrentsarealsomoreenergyefficientthanothersynapticregimes.Thus,byproducingfewer,moreinformative spikes approximately balanced synaptic currents in cortical n