2011/08/19 by Juan A. Varela, Jungang Wang, Andrew L. Varnell +3 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Neuroscience · Physics and Astronomy · #Biology #Cognition #Conductance #Electrophysiology #Excitatory postsynaptic potential #Inhibitory postsynaptic potential #Materials science #Neural dynamics and brain function #Neuroplasticity #Neuroscience #Neuroscience and Neural Engineering #Physics #Plasticity #Postsynaptic potential #Prefrontal cortex #q-bio.NC #stochastic dynamics and bifurcation
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/npre.2011.6267.1
2 pages 2 figures Nature Precedings <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2011.6267.1> (2011)
openalex publication_date 2011/08/19 · arxiv created 2012/04/04 · arxiv updated 2012/04/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract Behavioral control over stressful stimuli induces resilience to future conditions when control is lacking. The medial prefrontal cortex(mPFC) is a critically important brain region required for plasticity of stress resilience. We found that control over stress induces plasticity of the intrinsic voltage-gated conductances of pyramidal neurons in the PFC. To gain insight into the underlying biophysical mechanisms of this plasticity we used the conductance- based neural simulation software tool, NEURON, to model the increase in membrane excitability associated with resilience to stress. A ball and stick multicompartment conductance-based model was used to realistically fit passive and active data traces from prototypical pyramidal neurons in neurons in rats with control over tail shock stress and those lacking control. The results indicate that the plasticity of membrane excitability associated with control over stress can be attributed to an increase in Na+ and Ca2+ T-type conductances and an increase in the leak conductance. Using simulated dendritic synaptic inputs we observed an increase in excitatory postsynaptic summation and amplification resulting in elevated action potential output. This realistic simulation suggests that control over stress enhances the output of the PFC and offers specific testable hypotheses to guide future electrophysiological mechanistic studies in animal models of resilience and vulnerability to stress.