View article

Recent theoretical and experimental work indicates that neurons tune themselves to maintain target levels of excitation by modulating ion channel expression and synaptic strengths. As a result, functionally equivalent circuits can produce similar activity despite disparate underlying network and cellular properties. To experimentally test the extent to which synaptic and intrinsic conductances can produce target activity in the presence of variability in neuronal intrinsic properties, we used the dynamic clamp to create hybrid two-cell circuits built from four types of stomatogastric neurons coupled to the same model Morris–Lecar neuron by reciprocal inhibition. We measured six intrinsic properties (input resistance, minimum membrane potential, firing rate in response to +1 nA of injected current, slope of the frequency–current curve, spike height, and spike voltage threshold) of dorsal gastric, gastric mill, lateral pyloric …