The Journal of Neurophysiology Vol. 84 No. 2 August 2000, pp. 1098-1102
Copyright ©2000 by the American Physiological Society

RAPID COMMUNICATION

Population and Unit Synchrony of Fast Rhythms in Expiratory Recurrent Laryngeal Discharges

Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York 10461

Huang, Wu-Xin and Morton I. Cohen. Population and Unit Synchrony of Fast Rhythms in Expiratory Recurrent Laryngeal Discharges. J. Neurophysiol. 84: 1098-1102, 2000. In a decerebrate, vagotomized, gallamine-paralyzed cat that had a prominent bilaterally coherent fast rhythm (50 Hz) in expiratory (E) recurrent laryngeal (RL) nerve discharges, recordings were taken of the firing of nine RL E fibers. This rhythm (called E high-frequency oscillation or EHFO) was seen as a sharp peak in all unit autospectra, all unit-nerve coherence spectra (value range 0.39-0.91), and all unit-unit coherence spectra (value range 0.27-0.85). In addition, 8/9 units had a sharp autospectral peak in a lower frequency range (19-35 Hz) called E medium-frequency oscillation (EMFO), but there was no coherence at this frequency between signal pairs (unit-unit, unit-nerve, nerve-nerve). The MFOs are specific for each unit and are considered to arise from asynchronous inputs and membrane properties. The HFOs are considered to arise from widespread network interactions that produce a common (correlated) rhythm in virtually all neurons of the RL E network. These phenomena suggest the use of the RL E network as a model system for analyzing rhythmic neural interactions.