Temporal integration on the dendrites of fast-spiking basket cells

Synaptic inputs received by neurons exhibit a wide range of temporal patterns in vivo, and illuminating how neurons integrate these patterns is critical to understanding how the brain processes information. Fast-spiking basket cells, which perform both supralinear and sublinear dendritic integration, are instrumental in the inhibition control in the hippocampus, while their responses and mechanisms underlying different temporal input patterns remain unclear. To address this question, we perform distinguishable temporal simulation protocols on a detailed compartmental model of basket cells. When synaptic inputs arrive dispersed in space, we find the nonlinearity of neural response declines when inputs are more asynchronous, independent of the backpropagation action potentials. Supralinear dendrites and dendritic potassium channels dominate this phenomenon. Furthermore, the number of action potentials shows that the neuron responds more effectively to asynchronous inputs, owing to the effective barrier of single dendrite to attenuation. These results may provide insight into the temporal coding of fast-spiking basket cells in neuronal oscillation.