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We introduce a novel detailed conductance-based model of the bursting activity in external tufted (ET) cells of the olfactory bulb. We investigate the mechanisms underlying their bursting, and make experimentally-testable predictions. The ionic currents included in the model are specific to ET cells, and their kinetic and other parameters are based on experimental recordings. We validate the model by showing that its bursting characteristics under various conditions (e.g. blocking various currents) are consistent with experimental observations. Further, we identify the bifurcation structure and dynamics that explain bursting behavior. This analysis allows us to make predictions of the response of the cell to current pulses at different burst phases. We find that depolarizing (but not hyperpolarizing) inputs received during the interburst interval can advance burst timing, creating the substrate for synchronization by excitatory connections. It has been hypothesized that such synchronization among the ET cells within one glomerulus might help coordinate the glomerular output. Next we investigate model parameter sensitivity and identify parameters that play the most prominent role in controlling each burst characteristic, such as the burst frequency and duration. Finally, the response of the cell to periodic inputs is examined, reflecting the sniffing-modulated input that these cell receive in vivo. We find that individual cells can be better entrained by inputs with higher, rather than lower, frequencies than the intrinsic bursting frequency of the cell. Nevertheless, a heterogeneous population of ET cells (as may be found in a glomerulus) is able to produce reliable periodic population responses even at lower input frequencies.

A generalization of vector fields, referred to as N-direction fields or cross fields when N = 4, has been recently introduced and studied for geometry processing, with applications in quadrilateral (quad) meshing, texture mapping, and parameterization. We make the observation that cross field design for two-dimensional quad meshing is related to the well-known Ginzburg-Landau problem from mathematical physics. This yields a variety of theoretical tools for efficiently computing boundary-aligned quad meshes, with provable guarantees on the resulting mesh, such as the number of mesh defects and bounds on the defect locations. The procedure for generating the quad mesh is to (i) find a complex-valued "representation" field that minimizes the Ginzburg-Landau energy subject to a boundary constraint, (ii) convert the representation field into a boundary-aligned, smooth cross field, (iii) use separatrices of the cross field to partition the domain into four sided regions, and (iv) mesh each of these four-sided regions using standard techniques. Leveraging the Ginzburg-Landau theory, we prove that this procedure can be used to produce a cross field whose separatrices partition the domain into four sided regions. To minimize the Ginzburg-Landau energy for the representation field, we use an extension of the Merriman-Bence-Osher (MBO) threshold dynamics method, originally conceived as an algorithm to simulate mean curvature flow. Finally, we demonstrate the method on a variety of test domains., Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures