Northwestern Events Calendar

Feb
12
2020

"The Argonne National Lab Supercomputer Facilities, Neural Network Simulations and Reverse Engineering of Neuron Firing Patterns"

When: Wednesday, February 12, 2020
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM CT

Where: Ward Building, 5-230, 303 E. Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Donna Daviston   (312) 503-1687

Group: Neuroscience Roundtables

Category: Academic

Description:

Speaker: CJ Heckman, Ph.D.

Abstract

These studies combine two advances, 1) availability of array electrodes to measure firing patterns of populations of motoneurons in humans, via motoneuron connections to muscle fibers, and 2) our recently developed collaboration with Argonne National Labs to use supercomputer approaches to analyze these firing patterns. The huge advantage of the supercomputer approach is that their massive parallelism allows thousands (soon millions) of simulations to be carried out simultaneously. In this particular application, we use this computational power as the basis of a brute force approach to reverse engineer motoneuron firing patterns to identify the organization of their synaptic inputs. More specifically our goal is to identify the relative roles of excitatory, inhibitory and neuromodulatory inputs. Though in theory, a given motor output pattern could be generated by a huge number of combinations of these three types of input, neuromodulatory input makes motoneuron input-output properties so nonlinear that the effective “solution space” is restricted. These high levels of neuromodulatory are coupled to strong inhibitory inputs, with interaction between these two input types providing the “amplifier” upon which excitation acts to execute the pattern of the movement.

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