ORAL PRESENTATION Open Access Modelling phase precession in the hippocampus

The activity of cells in the rodent hippocampus is strongly modulated by both the location of the animal and the ongoing theta oscillation. Place cells, but not interneurons, show a strong spatial modulation of their firing rates, while both place cells and interneurons exhibit phase precession, a phenomenon whereby they spike at a faster frequency than the LFP theta oscilla-tion, causing their spikes to shift to an earlier phase of this rhythm on each successive cycle [1-3]. Despite extensive research into this phenomenon, the mechan-isms underlying phase precession remain unclear. Place cells and interneurons are reciprocally connected in the CA1 region of the hippocampus. The interneurons receive pacemaker input from the medial septum, which entrains theta oscillations in the circuit. We teste