Effects of DC electric fields on neuronal excitability: A bifurcation analysis

Abstract

In this paper, the effects of external DC electric fields on the neuro-computational properties are investigated in the context of Morris–Lecar (ML) model with bifurcation analysis. We obtain the detailed bifurcation diagram in two-dimensional parameter space of externally applied DC current and trans-membrane potential induced by external DC electric field. The bifurcation sets partition the two-dimensional parameter space in terms of the qualitatively different behaviors of the ML model. Thus the neuron's information encodes the stimulus information, and vice versa, which is significant in neural control. Furthermore, we identify the electric field as a key parameter to control the transitions among four different excitability and spiking properties, which facilitates the design of electric fields based neuronal modulation method.