Department of Neural Engineering and Biological Interdisciplinary Studies, Institute of Military Cognition and Brain Sciences, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, PR China; Stem Cell and Tissue Engineering Lab, Institute of Health Service and Transfusion Medicine, Beijing, PR China.
Department of Neural Engineering and Biological Interdisciplinary Studies, Institute of Military Cognition and Brain Sciences, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, PR China.
Med Eng Phys. 2019 Sep;71:91-97. doi: 10.1016/j.medengphy.2019.07.007. Epub 2019 Jul 13.
Microelectrode arrays (MEAs) allow the investigation of the pharmacological and toxicological effects of chemicals on cultured neuronal networks. Understanding the functional connections between neurons and the resulting neuronal networks is important for evaluating drugs that affect synaptic transmission. Therefore, we acutely treated a mature cultured neuronal network on MEAs with accumulating amounts of glutamate and recorded their altered electrophysiology. Subsequently, a cross-covariance analysis was applied to process the spiking activity in the network and to evaluate the connections between neurons. Finally, graph theory was used to assess the functional network properties under acute glutamate treatment. Our data demonstrated that glutamate increased the similarity, connectivity weight, density, and largest-component size of the functional network. In addition, the small-world network topology was altered after glutamate treatment. Our results indicate that the graph theory can advance our understanding of the pharmacological significance of neurotransmitters on neuronal networks.
微电极阵列 (MEA) 允许研究化学物质对培养神经元网络的药理学和毒理学影响。了解神经元之间的功能连接以及由此产生的神经元网络对于评估影响突触传递的药物很重要。因此，我们用逐渐增加的谷氨酸急性处理 MEA 上的成熟培养神经元网络，并记录它们改变的电生理学。随后，应用互协方差分析来处理网络中的尖峰活动，并评估神经元之间的连接。最后，使用图论来评估急性谷氨酸处理下的功能网络特性。我们的数据表明，谷氨酸增加了功能网络的相似性、连接权重、密度和最大组件大小。此外，谷氨酸处理后小世界网络拓扑结构发生了改变。我们的结果表明，图论可以促进我们对神经递质对神经元网络的药理学意义的理解。
