COMPUTATIONAL ASPECTS OF VOLATILE ANESTHETIC ACTION AT THE THALAMUS

这个子项目是众多研究子项目之一

This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Although anesthetics are known to modulate the activity of a number of voltage-gated and ligand-gated ion channels, the specific site(s) and mechanism(s) of anesthetic action remain controversial. The process of determining how effects at individual ion channels are integrated to produce the anesthetic state at the systems level is complicated by limited knowledge of what constitutes that state at the systems level, and the possibility that general anesthesia may be an amalgam of a number of separate effects. Computational and theoretical techniques are tools of increasing importance to systems neurobiology. Using these tools, highly specific mathematical descriptions of neural behavior can be simulated to evaluate the integrated response to known anesthetic effects at the receptor level. This approach may be useful for linking what is known about anesthetic action at the ion channel with overall systems level behavior.