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Plasticity is an essential property of neurons and neural circuits. However, the ability to maintain stable patterns of activity while undergoing plastic change is critically important for the maintenance of the activity patterns that characterize a neuron or a functional neuronal network. Previous theoretical and experimental results suggest that neurons stabilize their activity by altering the number and/or characteristics of ion currents to regulate dynamically their intrinsic electrical properties. We present both experimental and modeling evidence to show that activity-dependent regulation of conductances, operating at the level of individual neurons, can also stabilize network activity. This suggests that, in the stomatogastric ganglion of the crab, two fundamentally different modes of operation can sustain a characteristic type of activity: one that is strictly conditional upon the presence of neuromodulatory afferences from adjacent ganglia, and another that is independent of neuromodulatory input but relies on newly developed intrinsic properties of the component neurons. |
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