Thalamic control of sensory processing and spindles in a biophysical somatosensory thalamoreticular circuit model of wakefulness and sleep

Thalamoreticular circuitry plays a key role in arousal, attention, cognition, and sleep spindles, and is linked to several brain disorders. A detailed computational model of mouse somatosensory thalamus and thalamic reticular nucleus has been developed to capture the properties of over 14,000 neurons connected by 6 million synapses. The model recreates the biological connectivity of these neurons, and simulations of the model reproduce multiple experimental findings in different brain states. The model shows that inhibitory rebound produces frequency-selective enhancement of thalamic responses during wakefulness. We find that thalamic interactions are responsible for the characteristic waxing and waning of spindle oscillations. In addition, we find that changes in thalamic excitability control spindle frequency and their incidence. The model is made openly available to provide a new tool for studying the function and dysfunction of the thalamoreticular circuitry in various brain states. [Display omitted] •A computational model of thalamoreticular microcircuitry is presented and publicly available•Thalamic inhibitory rebound leads to frequency-specific enhancement of sensory responses•Interactions within the thalamus produce distinctive waxing and waning of spindle oscillations•Alterations in thalamic excitability influence frequency and occurrence of spindle oscillations Iavarone et al. present a computational model of thalamoreticular microcircuitry providing insight into thalamic interactions during wakefulness and sleep. They find common mechanisms that regulate the frequency-dependent enhancement of sensory responses and fluctuations of spindle oscillations, and discover that thalamic excitability controls spindle frequency and incidence.