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This lab exercise is made available as part of the 2008 Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience Workshop at Macalester College.

To download the simulation package, click here.
Running the simulations requires NEURON 6.1, which you can download from here.

About the exercise
This is a stripped-down version of a lab exercise I designed for the 2008 Neural Systems and Behavior Course taught at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. The exercise is rather free-form—it provides an environment for students to explore the physiological functions of different types of conductances. It was a hit with the students in the course (post-docs and graduate students with varying levels of electrophysiology knowledge), but probably needs additional structure to be of use for undergraduate students. Nevertheless, I think it could be a useful starting point for an in-class exercise or simply as a lecture aid to show how different conductances shape membrane potential. The docs subdirectory contains an initial exercise to provide basic familiarity with NEURON and would make a useful starting point .

About the Model
This exercise is based on a model leech T-Cell developed by Cataldo et al. (2005). This cell features 6 conductances:

1) a leak current (tleak)
2) voltage-gated inactivating sodium current (tna)
3) voltage-gated delayed rectifier potassium current (tk)
4) voltage-gated calcium current (tca)
5) calcium-activated potassium current (tkca)
6) an electrogenic sodium pump (tnapump)

I reduced this model down to a single compartment to make it run faster—it produces very similar behavior, but the conductance densities are no longer anchored to empirical data. Code for the full multi-compartmental model is also included.

Today is Monday the 23rd

News

12/20/2007
Merry Christmas and Happy New Years. Tavi will be 5 months old tomorrow. He's had his first cold, but is doing great, with lots of smiling, laughing, and chewing. Bob's just had a new paper published here.

8/8/2007
So much happening so quickly! Tavi's thriving and putting on weight. We've found a great place to stay in Chicago. And Bob's just had two papers accepted to the Journal of Neurophysiology: here and here.

7/21/2007
Octavian has joined the family. He was born at 8:00 AM. Photos are here. Tavi brings good luck with him: Bob had a paper accepted to J Neurophys the evening before Tavi arrived.

5/25/2007
Well, we can finally make it official--we're moving to Chicago in August, 2007. Bob has accepted a position as assistant professor in the psychology department of Dominican University. Irina has accepted a position as research assistant professor in the anatomy department of Anatomy and Cell Biology in the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Chicago. We're both very excited about the new positions and the chance to closer to friends and family.