Abstract

In this chapter, we present different methods to analyze intracellular recordings and the testing of these methods using dynamic-clamp techniques. The methods are derived from a model of synaptic background activity where the synaptic membrane conductances are considered as stochastic processes. Because this fluctuating point-conductance model can be treated analytically, different methods can be outlined to estimate different characteristics of synaptic noise from the membrane potential (V_m) activity, such as the mean and variance of the excitatory and inhibitory conductance distributions (the VmD method) or spike-triggered averages of conductances. These analysis methods can be validated in controlled conditions using dynamic-clamp injection of known synaptic conductance patterns, as we illustrate here. Our approach constitutes a novel application of the dynamic clamp, which could be extended to the testing of other methods for extracting conductance information from the recorded V_m activity of neurons.