Recent advances in experimental techniques have allowed the simultaneous recordings of
populations of hundreds of neurons, fostering a debate about the nature of the collective
structure of population neural activity. Much of this debate has focused on the
empirical findings of a phase transition in the parameter space of maximum entropy
models describing the measured neural probability distributions, interpreting this phase
transition to indicate a critical tuning of the neural code. Here, we instead focus on the
possibility that this is a first-order phase transition which provides evidence that the
real neural population is in a `structured', collective state. We show that this collective
state is robust to changes in stimulus ensemble and adaptive state. We find that the
pattern of pairwise correlations between neurons has a strength that is well within the
strongly correlated regime and does not require fine tuning, suggesting that this state is
generic for populations of 100+ neurons. We find a clear correspondence between the
emergence of a phase transition, and the emergence of attractor-like structure in the
inferred energy landscape. A collective state in the neural population, in which neural
activity patterns naturally form clusters, provides a consistent interpretation for our
results.
Webb, Michael; Jacobs, William; An, Yaxin; Oliver, Wesley
Abstract:
This distribution compiles thermodynamic and (where available) dynamic properties of short protein sequences as obtained from coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. The dataset features 2114 protein sequences with sequence lengths ranging from N=20 up to N=50 amino acids. The simulation and analysis of these sequences is described in "Active learning of the thermodynamics--dynamics tradeoff in protein condensates'' by Yaxin An, Michael A. Webb*, and William M. Jacobs* (https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.03696). Of the 2114 protein sequences, 80 are homomeric polypeptides (replicating a single amino acid for N = 20, 30, 40, and 50), 1266 are sourced from version 9.0 of the DisProt database, and the remaining 768 sequences are novel sequences generated during an active learning campaign described in the aforementioned manuscript. The simulations were performed using the LAMMPS molecular dynamics engine. The interactions used for simulation are obtained from R. M. Regy , J. Thompson , Y. C. Kim and J. Mittal , Improved coarse-grained model for studying sequence dependent phase separation of disordered proteins, Protein Sci., 2021, 1371 —1379. Properties included in this distribution include second virial coefficients, pressure-density data, expectation for phase behavior at 300 K, estimated condensed-phase densities at 300 K (if exist), and condensed-phase self-diffusion coefficients at 300 K (if exist).
