A model of stimulus-specific neural assemblies in the insect antennal lobe

English. It has been proposed that synchronized neural assemblies in the antennal lobe of insects encode the identity of olfactory stimuli. In response to an odor, some projection neurons exhibit synchronous firing, phase-locked to the oscillations of the field potential, whereas others do not. Experimental data indicate that neural synchronization and field oscillations are induced by fast GABA(A)-type inhibition, but it remains unclear how desynchronization occurs. We hypothesize that slow inhibition plays a key role in desynchronizing projection neurons. Because synaptic noise is believed to be the dominant factor that limits neuronal reliability, we consider a computational model of the antennal lobe in which a population of oscillatory neurons interact through unreliable GABA(A) and GABA(B) inhibitory synapses. From theoretical analysis and extensive computer simulations, we show that transmission failures at slow GABA(B) synapses make the neural response unpredictable. Depending on the balance between GABA(A) and GABA(B) inputs, particular neurons may either synchronize or desynchronize. These findings suggest a wiring scheme that triggers stimulus-specific synchronized assemblies. Inhibitory connections are set by Hebbian learning and selectively activated by stimulus patterns to form a spiking associative memory whose storage capacity is comparable to that of classical binary-coded models. We conclude that fast inhibition acts in concert with slow inhibition to reformat the glomerular input into odor-specific synchronized neural assemblies.

French. A fundamental question in computational neuroscience is to understand how interactions between neurons underlie sensory coding and information storage. In the first relay of the insect olfactory system, odorant stimuli trigger synchronized activities in neuron populations. Synchronized assemblies may arise as a consequence of inhibitory coupling, because they are disrupted when inhibition is pharmacologically blocked. Using computational modelling, we studied the role of inhibitory, noisy interactions in producing stimulus-specific synchrony. So far, experimental data and modelling studies indicate that fast inhibition induces neural synchrony, but it remains unclear how desynchronization occurs. From theoretical analysis and computer simulations, we found that slow inhibition plays a key role in desynchronizing neurons. Depending on the balance between fast and slow inhibitory inputs, particular neurons may either synchronize or desynchronize. The complementary roles of the two synaptic time scales in the formation of neural assemblies suggest a wiring scheme that produces stimulus-specific inhibitory interactions and endows inhibitory sub-circuits with properties of binary memories.