Mellor Nicholas G, Graham E Scott, Unsworth Charles P
Department of Engineering Science, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
Department of Molecular Medicine and Pathology, School of Medical Sciences, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
Front Physiol. 2022 Jun 17;13:808730. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2022.808730. eCollection 2022.
Networks of neurons are typically studied in the field of Criticality. However, the study of astrocyte networks in the brain has been recently lauded to be of equal importance to that of the neural networks. To date criticality assessments have only been performed on networks astrocytes from healthy rats, and astrocytes from cultured dissociated resections of intractable epilepsy. This work, for the first time, presents studies of the critical dynamics and shape collapse of calcium waves observed in cultures of healthy human astrocyte networks derived from the human hNT cell line. In this article, we demonstrate that avalanches of spontaneous calcium waves display strong critical dynamics, including power-laws in both the size and duration distributions. In addition, the temporal profiles of avalanches displayed self-similarity, leading to shape collapse of the temporal profiles. These findings are significant as they suggest that cultured networks of healthy human hNT astrocytes self-organize to a critical point, implying that healthy astrocytic networks operate at a critical point to process and transmit information. Furthermore, this work can serve as a point of reference to which other astrocyte criticality studies can be compared.
神经元网络通常在临界性领域进行研究。然而,近年来,大脑中星形胶质细胞网络的研究被认为与神经网络的研究具有同等重要性。迄今为止,临界性评估仅在来自健康大鼠的星形胶质细胞网络以及来自难治性癫痫培养解离切除组织的星形胶质细胞上进行。这项工作首次展示了对源自人类hNT细胞系的健康人类星形胶质细胞网络培养物中观察到的钙波临界动力学和形状坍塌的研究。在本文中,我们证明自发钙波的雪崩显示出强烈的临界动力学,包括大小和持续时间分布的幂律。此外,雪崩的时间轮廓显示出自相似性,导致时间轮廓的形状坍塌。这些发现意义重大,因为它们表明健康人类hNT星形胶质细胞的培养网络自组织到一个临界点,这意味着健康的星形胶质细胞网络在一个临界点运作以处理和传输信息。此外,这项工作可以作为其他星形胶质细胞临界性研究的比较参考点。