Christian Leibold and Felix Felmy: Synaptic mechanisms underlying temporally precise information processing in the VNLL

Neurons in the Ventral Nucleus of the Lateral Lemniscus (VNLL) respond most precisely to rapid transients in sounds. In-vitro recordings have shown that their excitatory postsynaptic currents however have two
components: A fast, large onset and a slow small amplitude component. In this project we seek to understand the functional purpose of the second slow component.
We do so by developing a computational model of synaptic integration and spike generation that captures in-vitro physiology and use the model to make predictions about the neuron's response to amplitude modulated signals. The model will allow us to assess the effects of the slow snyaptic component on information transfer and speech discriminability.