Spikelets and electrical coupling in hippocampal neurons

Electrical coupling in hippocampal slices may lead to or enhance epileptiform bursts. Spikelets are biphasic potentials recorded intracellularly from neurons ranging up to 5 millivolts in amplitude resulting from electrical coupling. They have been shown to be very similar in appearance to differentiated action potentials. The mechanism responsible for their appearance has been linked to both field effects and gap junctions although the exact role of each is not known. The boundary element method was used to implement 3-dimensional models of neurons complete with dendritic trees. A novel approach was employed which used a mixture of triangular somatic elements and cylindrical dendritic elements. Based on the results, it is hypothesized that spikelets are due to field effects of several neurons whose electrical activity is synchronized by gap junctions