Measuring Conductance of Neurons in Experiment

To understand synaptic mechanisms underlying neuronal computations, a fundamental approach is to use voltage clamp to measure the dynamics of excitatory and inhibitory input conductances. Due to the space clamp effect, the biological interpretation of the measured conductance is questionable. We propose the concept of effective conductance that is proportional to the local input conductance on the dendrites and reflects directly the synaptic impact on spike generation, and develop a framework to determine the effective conductance reliably.