Held on Friday June 18th 2004: ICMS, 14 India St, Edinburgh.
A one-day meeting on Modelling of Neuronal Dendritic Trees was held on Friday 18th June at 14 India St. Edinburgh, the birth place of James Clerk Maxwell and home to the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences. Organised by Dr Stephen Coombes (Nottingham) and Dr Gabriel Lord (Heriot-Watt), the workshop focused on the application of mathematical tools from modelling and numerical analysis to information processing and learning within a single neuron with branched dendritic structure. The meeting brought together around 40 researchers in computational neuroscience, applied mathematics and the life sciences. Professor John Rinzel (Center for Neural Science, NYU), started the meeting by giving a thorough background about the compartmental method and the seminal contributions of Wilfrid Rall. He emphasised a minimalistic approach to investigating dendritic cable properties using only a few spatial/electrical compartments. Using a comprehensive compartmental simulation study, Dr Arnd Roth (UCL) then explained the link between dendritic morphology and the experimentally observed patterns of forward and backward propagating action potentials seen in real neurons. The usefulness of mathematical analysis was highlighted by the talk of Professor Steve Cox (Rice University, Texas), who described a rigorous approach for estimating the location and time course of synaptic input from multi-site potential recordings. Dr Mickey London (UCL) illustrated the success of information theory in uncovering the role of dendritic structure in neuronal computation and Dr Bruce Graham (Stirling University) spoke about dynamics of synaptic integration in a hippocampal pyramidal neuron model. Some new mathematical ideas in compartmental modelling were introduced by Dr Ken Lindsay (Glasgow) and the meeting concluded with a talk by Dr David Barber (IDIAP, Switzerland) on a mathematical framework for learning with dendritic spines. Overall the workshop was very successful, with a large attendance, excellent presentations and fruitful discussions. The meeting was financially supported by the ICIAM99 fund.