Hair Cell Models

[Harry Erwin <harry.erwin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The paper by Glowatzki and Fuchs ('Transmitter release at the hair
cell ribbon synapse' in Nature neuroscience, v 5 nr 2, Feb 2002)
appears to do a good job of forcing a rethink of the available hair
cell models. They show that the ribbon synapse seems to operate by
multivesicle release, with the number of vesicles being released in a
single event insensitive to degree of depolarization. They do note
that the amplitude histogram should be described by binomial
statistics; however, they were unable to fit binomial distributions
to this data.

This raises the following question: Consider the curve relating the
rate of vesicle release events at a hair cell ribbon synapse to
depolarization. Is there any evidence that the spontaneous rate of
vesicle release events lies on the same curve?
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Harry Erwin, PhD, Senior Lecturer of Computing, University of
Sunderland. Computational neuroscientist modeling bat bioacoustics
and behavior. <http://www.cet.sunderland.ac.uk/~cs0her/index.html>