Ja n 20 05 Comment on : Characterization of subthreshold voltage fluctuations in neuronal membranes by M . Rudolph and A .

In a recent paper, Rudolph and Destexhe (Neural Comp. 15, 2577-2618, 2003) studied a leaky integrator model (i.e. an RC-circuit) driven by correlated (“colored”) Gaussian conductance noise and Gaussian current noise. They derived an expression for the stationary probability density of the membrane voltage. Here we show by standard analysis of solvable limit cases and by numerical simulations that their result does not hold for the general colored-noise case and uncover the errors made in the derivation of a Fokker-Planck equation for the probability density.