Estimation of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic conductance variations in motoneurons during locomotor-like rhythmic activity

• We estimate the variations of synaptic conductance from a single voltage trace.
• Estimation was achieved without experimentally measuring leak parameters.
• Estimation was made from voltage traces recorded in MNs in an in vitro spinal cord preparation.
• MNs were synaptically modulated in a ‘push–pull’ manner during locomotor-like activity.

The rhythmic activity of motoneurons (MNs) that underlies locomotion in mammals is generated by synaptic inputs from the locomotor network in the spinal cord. Thus, the quantitative estimation of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic conductances is essential to understand the mechanism by which the network generates the functional motor output. Conductance estimation is obtained from the voltage–current relationship measured by voltage-clamp- or current-clamp-recording with knowledge of the leak parameters of the recorded neuron. However, it is often difficult to obtain sufficient data to estimate synaptic conductances due to technical difficulties in electrophysiological experiments using in vivo or in vitro preparations. To address this problem, we estimated the average variations in excitatory and inhibitory synaptic conductance during a locomotion cycle from a single voltage trace without measuring the leak parameters. We found that the conductance variations can be accurately reconstructed from a voltage trace of 10 cycles by analyzing synthetic data generated from a computational model. Next, the conductance variations were estimated from mouse spinal MNs in vitro during drug-induced-locomotor-like activity. We found that the peak of excitatory conductance occurred during the depolarizing phase of the locomotor cycle, whereas the peak of inhibitory conductance occurred during the hyperpolarizing phase. These results suggest that the locomotor-like activity is generated by push–pull modulation via excitatory and inhibitory synaptic inputs.

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