- Poster presentation
- Open Access
Dynamics of two-process astrocyte networks
- Daniel Maruyama1Email author and
- Michal Zochowski1, 2
https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2202-14-S1-P433
© Maruyama and Zochowski; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013
- Published: 8 July 2013
Keywords
- Potassium
- Animal Model
- Recent Work
- Information Processing
- Network Activity
Computation in the brain is often thought of as being carried out solely by neurons without regards to their supporting cells. Recent work suggests that astrocytes may play a role alongside neurons in information processing. We investigated what types of spatio-temporal patterning can be supported for such a network. Namely the astrocyte networks contained both fast speed direct connections, representing gap junction coupling, and slower speed extracellular connections, representing local ATP diffusion or changes in local potassium concentration. We investigated what spatio-temporal dynamics results from the interplay between these two processes. We observed each process individually drive network activity and saw competition between the local and direct connections.
Declarations
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by NSF CMMI 1029388 (MZ), NSF PoLS 1058034 (MZ)
Authors’ Affiliations
Copyright
This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.