NEURON DEMO FOR CONDUCTANCE-BASED INTEGRATE-AND-FIRE MODEL

                          Alain Destexhe

            Department of Physiology, Laval University,
                      Quebec G1K 7P4, Canada

Present address: CNRS, UNIC (Bat-33), Avenue de la Terrasse,
                 91198 Gif-sur-Yvette, France

                      Destexhe@iaf.cnrs-gif.fr
                     http://cns.iaf.cnrs-gif.fr

This package is running with the NEURON simulation program written by Michael
Hines and available on internet at:
  http://www.neuro.duke.edu/neuron/home.html

The package contains mechanisms (.mod files) and programs (.oc files) needed 
to simulate an integrate-and-fire version of the Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) model.  
During an action potential, the rate constants of the HH model (alphas and 
betas) vary steeply, due to their nonlinear voltage dependence.  Approximating 
these steep variations by rectangular pulses allows to integrate the HH model, 
leading to a type of integrate-and-fire model in which the Na and K 
conductances are taken into account.  For example, it has a refractory period 
and a variable reset, just like the HH model, but is much faster to simulate.  

This model was described in detail in the following paper:

  Destexhe, A.  Conductance-based integrate and fire models. 
  Neural Computation 9: 503-514, 1997. 

An electronic version of this paper is available at  http://cns.iaf.cnrs-gif.fr