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Cellular switches orchestrate rhythmic circuits

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Abstract

Small inhibitory neuronal circuits have long been identified as key neuronal motifs to generate and modulate the coexisting rhythms of various motor functions. Our paper highlights the role of a cellular switching mechanism to orchestrate such circuits. The cellular switch makes the circuits reconfigurable, robust, adaptable, and externally controllable. Without this cellular mechanism, the circuit rhythms entirely rely on specific tunings of the synaptic connectivity, which makes them rigid, fragile, and difficult to control externally. We illustrate those properties on the much studied architecture of a small network controlling both the pyloric and gastric rhythms of crabs. The cellular switch is provided by a slow negative conductance often neglected in mathematical modeling of central pattern generators. We propose that this conductance is simple to model and key to computational studies of rhythmic circuit neuromodulation.

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Author notes

  1. Guillaume Drion and Alessio Franci have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Liege, Liege, Belgium

    Guillaume Drion

  2. Department of Mathematics, Science Faculty, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Coyoacán, D.F., México

    Alessio Franci

  3. Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Rodolphe Sepulchre

Authors
  1. Guillaume Drion
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  2. Alessio Franci
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  3. Rodolphe Sepulchre
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Guillaume Drion.

Additional information

Communicated by Peter J. Thomas.

This article belongs to the Special Issue on Control Theory in Biology and Medicine. It derived from a workshop at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.

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Drion, G., Franci, A. & Sepulchre, R. Cellular switches orchestrate rhythmic circuits. Biol Cybern 113, 71–82 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-018-0778-6

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