Self-organized criticality of developing artificial neuronal networks and dissociated cell cultures

Self-organized criticality (SOC) [1] was first described inneuronal cell cultures by Beggs and Plenz [2]. Neuronalnetworks being in a critical state produce avalanche-likedischarges that are power-law distributed. The assessmentof avalanches in neuronal networks is a new way of look-ing at neuronal activities apart from bursts, synchroniza-tion etc. The main novelty of our approach is to assess theavalanche distribution at different developmental stagesof neuronal networks. For this, we used dissociated post-natal cell culture taken from the rat cortex. Experimentaldata was provided by the Ulrich Egert group, BCCN Fri-bourg, Germany. We found that different network statesas subcritical, critical or supracritical specify a time andspatial activity profile that is linked but not equivalent tolow, moderate or high levels in neuronal activity, respec-tively. We are the first who show that the activity profile incell cultures develop from supracritical states over subcrit-ical into critical states. To shed light to the dependency ofSOC on network development, we used a self-organizingartificial neuronal network model based on a previousmodel by Van Ooyen and Abbott [3-5]. An importantnovelty of our model is that it is more detailed withrespect to representing seperate axonal and dendriticfields [6,7]. The model network aims to develop towardsa homeostatic equilibrium in neuronal activity that isachieved by growth and retraction of axonal and dendriticfields. This abstract model already reproduces the tran-sient behavior as seen in cell cultures from supracriticalover subcritical to critical states. However, we found thatsome cell cultures remain in a subcritical regime. Themodel offers a simple explanation as depending on thestrength of inhibition, equivalent to the friction in self-organizing systems [8], neuronal networks may or maynot reach criticality even though they are homeostaticallyequilibrated.

• Publication year

  2009

• Venue

  BMC Neuroscience

• Publication date

  2009-07-13

• Fields of study

  Biology, Computer Science, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1186/1471-2202-10-S1-P215
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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