Brain extracellular matrix retains connectivity in neuronal networks

Brain extracellular matrix retains connectivity in neuronal networks

The formation and maintenance of connectivity are critically important for the processing and storage of information in neuronal networks. The brain extracellular matrix (ECM) appears during postnatal development and surrounds most neurons in the adult mammalian brain. Importantly, the removal of the ECM was shown to improve plasticity and post-traumatic recovery in the CNS, but little is known...

Editorial: Brain Extracellular Space: Geometry, Matrix and Physiological Importance

Synaptic connectivity in engineered neuronal networks.

In this study, we have demonstrated a method to organize cells in dissociated cultures using engineered chemical clues on the culture surface and determined their connectivity patterns. Although almost all elements of the synaptic transmission machinery between neurons or between neurons and muscle fibers can be studied separately in single-cell models in dissociated cultures, the difficulty of...

Synaptic connectivity in cultured hypothalamic neuronal networks.

We have developed a novel approach to analyze the synaptic connectivity of spontaneously active networks of hypothalamic neurons in culture. Synaptic connections were identified by recording simultaneously from pairs of neurons using the whole cell configuration of the patch-clamp technique and testing for evoked postsynaptic current responses to electrical stimulation of one of the neurons. Ex...

Detecting connectivity changes in neuronal networks.

We develop a method from semiparametric statistics (Cox, 1972) for the purpose of tracking links and connection strengths over time in a neuronal network from spike train data. We consider application of the method as implemented in Masud and Borisyuk (2011), and evaluate its use on data generated independently of the Cox model hypothesis, in particular from a spiking model of Izhikevich in fou...