Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Orlandi, Javier G.
• Soriano, Jordi
• Alvarez-Lacalle, Enrique
• Teller, Sara
• Casademunt, Jaume

Titel

Noise focusing and the emergence of coherent activity in neuronal cultures

Ist Teil von

• Nature physics, 2013-09, Vol.9 (9), p.582-590

Ort / Verlag

London: Nature Publishing Group UK

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• At early stages of development, neuronal cultures in vitro spontaneously reach a coherent state of collective firing in a pattern of nearly periodic global bursts. Although understanding the spontaneous activity of neuronal networks is of chief importance in neuroscience, the origin and nature of that pulsation has remained elusive. By combining high-resolution calcium imaging with modelling in silico , we show that this behaviour is controlled by the propagation of waves that nucleate randomly in a set of points that is specific to each culture and is selected by a non-trivial interplay between dynamics and topology. The phenomenon is explained by the noise focusing effect—a strong spatio-temporal localization of the noise dynamics that originates in the complex structure of avalanches of spontaneous activity. Results are relevant to neuronal tissues and to complex networks with integrate-and-fire dynamics and metric correlations, for instance, in rumour spreading on social networks. Neuronal networks can spontaneously exhibit periodic bursts of collective activity. High-resolution calcium imaging and computer modelling of in vitro cultures now reveal that this behaviour is a consequence of noise focusing—an implosive concentration of spontaneous activity due to the interplay between network topology and intrinsic neuronal dynamics.