This study addresses the origins of multiwhisker-receptive fields of neurons in the thalamic ventral posterior medial (VPM) nucleus of the rat. We sought to determine whether multiwhisker-receptive field synthesis occurs in VPM through convergent projections from the principalis (PrV) and interpolaris (SpVi) nuclei, or in PrV by intersubnuclear projections from the spinal trigeminal complex. We...

Accurate quantification of gross primary production (GPP) at regional and global scales is essential for carbon budgets and climate change studies. Five models, the vegetation photosynthesis model (VPM), the temperature and greenness model (TG), the alpine vegetation model (AVM), the greenness and radiation model (GR), and the MOD17 algorithm, were tested and calibrated at eight sites in China ...

We focus on the spatial discretization produced by the Variational Particle-Mesh (VPM) method for a prototype fluid equation the known as the EPDiff equation, which is short for Euler-Poincaré equation associated with the diffeomorphism group (of R, or of a ddimensional manifold Ω). The EPDiff equation admits measure valued solutions, whose dynamics are determined by the momentum maps for the l...

The massive feedback projections from cortex to the thalamus modulate sensory information transmission in many ways. We investigated the role of corticothalamic feedback projections on the directional selectivity (angular tuning) of neurons in the rat ventral posterior medial (VPM) nucleus to stimulation of their principal whisker. The angular tuning properties of single VPM neurons were compar...

In mammals, most sensory information passes through the thalamus before reaching cortex. In the rat whisker system, each macrovibrissa is represented by approximately 250 neurons in the ventral posterior medial nucleus (VPM) of the thalamus and approximately 10,000 neurons in a cortical barrel column. Here we quantify the sensory impact of individual thalamic neurons in the rat VPM. We first tr...