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closeWHEN THE RESEARCH WAS CONDUCTED
Posted by Michael_Forrest on 08 Apr 2013 at 08:21 GMT
The authors conducted this research in 2006 and 2007.
This paper was submitted to the Journal of Neuroscience in 2008. It underwent peer review there, where it met resistance to its findings. It was then submitted to PLoS Computational Biology in 2008, with the same outcome. In 2012, upon a PLoS ONE submission, the field was more agreeable and the paper was finally published. It had previously been presented as a poster in 2009* (ICONIP 09) and was a chapter in my Ph.D. thesis, submitted in 2008 ("Biophysics of Purkinje Computation"; Michael Forrest, University of Warwick).
The findings of the paper suggest that the sodium-potassium pump may not simply be a homeostatic, "housekeeping" molecule for ionic gradients; but might be a computation element in the cerebellum and the brain. This was, and is, a bold hypothesis.
* Forrest MD, Wall MJ, Press DA. The Sodium-Potassium Pump Controls the Intrinsic Firing of the Cerebellar Purkinje Neuron. Poster session presented at: 16th International Conference on Neural Information Processing; 2009 Dec 1-5; Bangkok, Thailand