Chapter 10 Statistical analysis and modeling of calcium waves in healthy and pathological astrocyte syncytia

Abstract

Publisher Summary The chapter demonstrates that calcium signaling in cultures of epileptic astrocytes differs significantly from cultures of healthy astrocytes. Calcium waves can be viewed as a fingerprint of the underlying complex physiological processes that create these waves and of its chemical environment. In other words, the intercellular calcium waves probe the ionic environment of the cell culture and their macroscopic features give clues about it. One of the remarkable features of the intercellular calcium waves is their large amount of “fuzziness.” This feature and their apparently random generation in cultures of rat hippocampal astrocytes motivate the second hypothesis that noise plays a role for the generation as well as the propagation of intercellular calcium waves. This difference can be quantified using the space–time cluster decomposition method. The chapter performs the space–time cluster analysis of calcium waves in cultures of astrocytes of rat brain and epileptic human tissue.