Simulating in vivo study of the effect of reduced dynorphin on burst and silence duration.

Our data simulates in vivo analysis using data from multiple cells by generating 100 model cells with random variation in the seven non-synaptic parameters used to fit the varied cells in Figure 3 (Table 4). The dynorphin antagonist was simulated by reducing k_D by 15% in each generated cell. This is sufficient to have a large effect on spike rate (A) and the burst duration histogram and hazard (B), comparable to the in vivo results in Brown et al 2006 [28] (c.f. their figure 5) but also shows very little effect on the silence (inter-burst interval) duration (C), similar to what they observe, suggesting that their results do not, as they interpret, exclude a role for dynorphin in generating inter-burst silence.