Thermal impact on spiking properties in Hodgkin-Huxley neuron with synaptic stimulus

The effect of environmental temperature on neuronal spiking behaviors is investigated by numerically simulating the temperature dependence of spiking threshold of the Hodgkin-Huxley neuron subject to synaptic stimulus. We find that the spiking threshold exhibits a global minimum in a specific temperature range where spike initiation needs weakest synaptic strength, which form the engineering perspective indicates the occurrence of optimal use of synaptic transmission in the nervous system. We further explore the biophysical origin of this phenomenon associated with ion channel gating kinetics and also discuss its possible biological relevance in information processing in neuronal systems.