Inhibitory control of spike timing precision

GABAergic inhibition via local interneurons may play a role in enhancing spike timing precision in principal cells, since it tends to eliminate the influence of initial conditions. However, both the number and the timing of inhibitory synaptic events may be variable across repeated trials. How does this variability affect the spike timing precision in principal neurons? In this paper, we derive an analytical expression for the spike output jitter as a function of the variability of the received inhibition. This study predicts that variable inhibition is especially tolerated as the number of inhibitory cells is large and the decay time constant of the GABAergic synapse is small, which is consistent with experimental data from early olfactory systems (antennal lobe for insects, olfactory bulb for vertebrates).