Saltatory waves in the spike-diffuse-spike model of active dendritic spines

In this Letter we present the explicit construction of a saltatory traveling pulse of non-constant profile in an idealized model of dendritic tissue. Excitable dendritic spine clusters, modeled with integrate-and-fire (IF) units, are connected to a passive dendritic cable at a discrete set of points. The saltatory nature of the wave is directly attributed to the breaking of translation symmetry in the cable. The conditions for propagation failure are presented as a function of cluster separation and IF threshold.