Richard C. Gerkin

TL;DR: The results indicate that the signaling machinery underlying spike timing–dependent plasticity (STDP) may be separated into functional modules that are sensitive to the spatiotemporal dynamics (rather than the amount of calcium influx).

TL;DR: Using a strain of transgenic mice in which the expression of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) is controlled by the promoter of the activity-dependent gene c-fos, it is found that neurons in sensory-spared areas rapidly regulate action potential threshold and spike frequency to decrease excitability.

TL;DR: Results of a crowdsourcing competition show that it is possible to accurately predict and reverse-engineer the smell of a molecule, with a predictive accuracy that closely approaches a key theoretical limit.

TL;DR: This work presents a set of model biochemical detectors, based on plausible molecular pathways, which make direct use of the time course of the calcium signal to reproduce these experimental STDP results, and provides computational evidence that small changes in the properties of back-propagation of action potentials or in synaptic dynamics can alter the calcium time course in ways that will significantly affect STDP induction by any detector based exclusively on postsynaptic calcium.

TL;DR: It is shown that a key advantage provided by physiological levels of intrinsic diversity is more efficient and more robust encoding of stimuli by the population as a whole, and that the populations that best encode stimulus features are not simply the most heterogeneous, but those that balance diversity with the benefits of neural similarity.