Stochastic Hodgkin-Huxley equations with colored noise terms in the conductances.

Abstract

The excitability of cells is facilitated by voltage-gated ion channels. These channels accommodate a multiple number of gates individually. The possible impact of that gate multiplicity on the cell's function, specifically when the membrane area is of limited size, was investigated in the author's prior work (Güler, 2011 ). There, it was found that a nontrivially persistent correlation takes place between the transmembrane voltage fluctuations (also between the fluctuations in the gating variables) and the component of open channel fluctuations attributed to the gate multiplicity. This nontrivial phenomenon was found to be playing a major augmentative role for the elevation of excitability and spontaneous firing in small cells. In addition, the same phenomenon was found to be enhancing spike coherence significantly. Here we extend Fox and Lu's ( 1994 ) stochastic Hodgkin-Huxley equations by incorporating colored noise terms into the conductances there to obtain a formalism capable of capturing the addressed cross-correlations. Statistics of spike generation, spike coherence, firing efficiency, latency, and jitter from the articulated set of equations are found to be highly accurate in comparison with the corresponding statistics from the exact microscopic Markov simulations. This way, it is demonstrated vividly that our formulation overcomes the inherent inadequacy of the Fox and Lu equations. Finally, a recently proposed diffusion approximation method (Linaro, Storace, & Giugliano, 2011 ) is taken into consideration, and a discussion on its character is pursued.