Universal Gröbner bases of toric ideals of combinatorial neural codes
Melissa Beer, Robert Davis, Thomas Elgin, Matthew E. Hertel, Kira Laws, Rajinder Mavi, Paula Mercurio, Alexandra Newlon · Involve a Journal of Mathematics · 2021
In the 1970s, O'Keefe and Dostrovsky discovered that certain neurons, called place cells, in an animal's brain are tied to its location within its arena. A combinatorial neural code is a collection of $0/1$-vectors which encode the patterns of co-firing activity among the place cells. Gross, Obatake, and Youngs have recently used techniques from toric algebra to study when a neural code is $0$- $1$-, or $2$-inductively pierced: a property that allows one to reconstruct a Venn diagram-like planar figure that acts as a geometric schematic for the neural co-firing patterns. This article examines their work closely by focusing on a variety of classes of combinatorial neural codes. In particular, we identify universal Gröbner bases of the toric ideal for these codes.