Eur. Phys. J. B 79, 61-66 (2011)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2010-10031-3

Effects of channel noise on firing coherence of small-world Hodgkin-Huxley neuronal networks

¹ Zhou Pei-Yuan Center for Applied Mathematics, Tsinghua Univeristy, 100084, Beijing, P.R. China
² Department of Dynamics and control, Beihang University, 100191, Beijing, P.R. China
³ Faculty of Natural Science and Mathematics, University of Maribor, Koroška cesta 160, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia
⁴ School of Mathematics and Systems Science, Beihang University, 100191, Beijing, P.R. China

Corresponding author: ^a sunxiaojuan.bj@gmail.com

Received: 12 January 2010
Revised: 19 July 2010
Published online: 6 December 2010

Abstract

We investigate the effects of channel noise on firing coherence of Watts-Strogatz small-world networks consisting of biophysically realistic HH neurons having a fraction of blocked voltage-gated sodium and potassium ion channels embedded in their neuronal membranes. The intensity of channel noise is determined by the number of non-blocked ion channels, which depends on the fraction of working ion channels and the membrane patch size with the assumption of homogeneous ion channel density. We find that firing coherence of the neuronal network can be either enhanced or reduced depending on the source of channel noise. As shown in this paper, sodium channel noise reduces firing coherence of neuronal networks; in contrast, potassium channel noise enhances it. Furthermore, compared with potassium channel noise, sodium channel noise plays a dominant role in affecting firing coherence of the neuronal network. Moreover, we declare that the observed phenomena are independent of the rewiring probability.