Neurons can respond to stimuli with temporally precise firing events and use precisely temporal spike patterns to encode
information. However, whether or not such precise temporal spike sequences occur in the spontaneous firing activity of
neuronal networks in vitro is not well understood. Advances in multi-electrode recording techniques allow study of the
dynamics of neuronal populations' activity and its role in information coding. In this report, the hippocampal neurons
from rats were cultured on a multi-microelectrode arrays dish and their spontaneous activities were recorded. The
plotting of interspike interval versus time was used to investigate the characteristics of temporal coding in spontaneous
spike trains. The results show that several unique temporal patterns of spike sequences appear twice with detail repeated
to within a millisecond in the same spike train, without any specific experimental perturbation. Groups of such repeating
sequences occur together, comprising apparent information units. The study demonstrates that intricate patterns of
precisely temporal structures are one of the main forms of temporal coding, and may encode information even during
spontaneous activity. This finding may further the understanding of the complex neuronal coding in spontaneous activity
in vitro or in vivo.
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