Vasilaki, E. and Giugliano, M. (2014) Emergence of Connectivity Motifs in Networks of Model Neurons with Short- and Long-term Plastic Synapses. PLoS ONE, 9 (1). e84626.
Abstract
Recent evidence in rodent cerebral cortex and olfactory bulb suggests that short-term dynamics of excitatory synaptic transmission is correlated to stereotypical connectivity motifs. It was observed that neurons with short-term facilitating synapses form predominantly reciprocal pairwise connections, while neurons with short-term depressing synapses form unidirectional pairwise connections. The cause of these structural differences in synaptic microcircuits is unknown. We propose that these connectivity motifs emerge from the interactions between short-term synaptic dynamics (SD) and long-term spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP). While the impact of STDP on SD was shown in vitro, the mutual interactions between STDP and SD in large networks are still the subject of intense research. We formulate a computational model by combining SD and STDP, which captures faithfully short- and long-term dependence on both spike times and frequency. As a proof of concept, we simulate recurrent networks of spiking neurons with random initial connection efficacies and where synapses are either all short-term facilitating or all depressing. For identical background inputs, and as a direct consequence of internally generated activity, we find that networks with depressing synapses evolve unidirectional connectivity motifs, while networks with facilitating synapses evolve reciprocal connectivity motifs. This holds for heterogeneous networks including both facilitating and depressing synapses. Our study highlights the conditions under which SD-STDP might the correlation between facilitation and reciprocal connectivity motifs, as well as between depression and unidirectional motifs. We further suggest experiments for the validation of the proposed mechanism.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2014 Vasilaki, Giugliano. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Computer Science (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EPSRC EP/J019534/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 17 Jul 2014 13:19 |
Last Modified: | 17 Jul 2014 13:19 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0084626 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Public Library of Science |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0084626 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:79760 |