Temporal Code-Driven Stimulation: Definition and Application to Electric Fish Signaling

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Closed-loop activity-dependent stimulation is a powerful methodology to assess information processing in biological systems. In this context, the development of novel protocols, their implementation in bioinformatics toolboxes and their application to different description levels open up a wide range of possibilities in the study of biological systems. We developed a methodology for studying biological signals representing them as temporal sequences of binary events. A specific sequence of these events (code) is chosen to deliver a predefined stimulation in a closed-loop manner. The response to this code-driven stimulation can be used to characterize the system. This methodology was implemented in a real time toolbox and tested in the context of electric fish signaling. We show that while there are codes that evoke a response that cannot be distinguished from a control recording without stimulation, other codes evoke a characteristic distinct response. We also compare the code-driven response to open-loop stimulation. The discussed experiments validate the proposed methodology and the software toolbox.
This work was funded by Spanish projects of Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad/FEDER TIN-2010-19607, TIN2014-54580-R, TIN-2012-30883, DPI2015 65833-P (http://www.mineco.gob.es/), ONRG grant N62909-14-1-N279, Brazilian Agency of Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico (http://www.cnpq.br/) and Fundacao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo (www.fapesp.br). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.