Dynamical Modeling and Identification of a GnRH neuron*

GnRH neurons, as key elements of the reproductive neuroendocrine system, have important central regulating role in the dynamics of the hormonal cycle. A Hodgkin-Huxley type neural model is proposed in this paper, that takes into account up-to-date biological literature data related to ion channels. The proposed neuron model is highly nonlinear in parameters and the evaluation of the objective function is computationally expensive, therefore the asynchronous parallel pattern search (APPS) procedure has been used for identification. The model with high number of estimated parameters provides a qualitatively good fit of both voltage clamp and current clamp traces.