Sancristóbal, BelenVicente, RaoulSancho, José MaríaGarcía Ojalvo, Jordi2015-06-082015-06-082013Sancristóbal B, Vicente R, Sancho JM, García-Ojalvo J. Emergent bimodal firing patterns implement different encoding strategies during gamma-band oscillations. Front Comput Neurosci. 2013;7:18. DOI: 10.3389/fncom.2013.000181662-5188http://hdl.handle.net/10230/23757Upon sensory stimulation, primary cortical areas readily engage in narrow-band rhythmic activity between 30 and 90 Hz, the so-called gamma oscillations. Here we show that, when embedded in a balanced network, type-I excitable neurons entrained to the collective rhythm show a discontinuity in their firing-rates between a slow and a fast spiking mode. This jump in the spiking frequencies is characteristic to type II neurons, but is not present in the frequency-current curve (f-I curve) of isolated type I neurons. Therefore, this rate bimodality arises as an emerging network property in type I population models. We have studied the mechanisms underlying the generation of these two firing modes, in order to reproduce the spiking activity of in vivo cortical recordings, which is known to be highly irregular and sparse. We have also analyzed the relation between afferent inputs and the single unit activity, and between the latter and the local field potential (LFP) phase, in order to establish how the collective dynamics modulates the spiking activity of the individual neurons. Our results reveal that the inhibitory-excitatory balance allows two encoding mechanisms, for input rate variations and LFP phase, to coexist within the network.application/pdfeng© 2013 Sancristóbal, Vicente, Sancho, and García-Ojalvo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.Neuronesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2013.00018Gamma oscillationsLocal field potentialBimodalCodingBurstininfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess