Astrocytes As Modulators Of Synaptic Information Transfer

Herbert Levine, Professor of Physics, University of California, San Diego
In collaboration with Vladislav Volman and Eshel Ben-Jacob, Tel-Aviv University, Israel

In recent years, evidence has been mounting regarding the possible role of astrocytes in the dynamics of neural tissue. In particular, the discovery of two-way astrocyte-microdomain to neural-synapse communication has demonstrated the inadequacy of the previously-held view regarding the purely supportive role for these glial cells. In this talk, we construct a phenomenological model for this communication and explore how this might give rise to the long-time-scale correlations for spiking seen in cultured neural networks.

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