Applying extracellular temperature

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Igoy
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Joined: Tue Jun 30, 2015 2:15 pm

Applying extracellular temperature

Post by Igoy »

Hi -

I currently export electric fields from COMSOL and apply them to a model neuron using the extracellular mechanism. I'd like to do the same, but in conjunction with the temperature distribution produced in my COMSOL model (temperature over space and time).

I imagine a mechanism similar to the extracellular stimulation mechanism can be used to update the temperature value in NEURON , however I don't think temperature is discretized spatially in NEURON. I may be wrong.

Any starting suggestions/points?
ted
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Re: Applying extracellular temperature

Post by ted »

NEURON has a global variable called celsius which is used to calculate Nernst potentials in models where ena, ek etc. are computed during initialization or during a simulation. celsius is also used by some NMODL-specified descriptions of ion channel gating to calculate rate constants. Since temperature in your model will not have the same value everywhere, everything that is temperature-sensitive must have a RANGE variable that represents local temperature, and use that in its own calculation of Nernst potentials and rate constants.

It's conceptually straightforward, but there could be many implementational details that require special treatment. Instead of diving into a preemptive discussion of all possible cases and caveats (and likely missing some in the process), it is best for us to continue this discussion via email. In order to provide specific advice, I will need to see the mod files that describe any ion channels, pumps etc. that you will use in your model; you could zip those up and send them to me at
ted dot carnevale at yale dot edu
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