Abstract
In vitro primary cultures of dissociated invertebrate neurons from locust ganglia are used to experimentally investigate the morphological evolution of assemblies of living neurons, as they self-organize from collections of separated cells into elaborated, clustered, networks. At all the different stages of the culture's development, identification of neurons' and neurites' location by means of a dedicated software allows to ultimately extract an adjacency matrix from each image of the culture. In turn, a systematic statistical analysis of a group of topological observables grants us the possibility of quantifying and tracking the progression of the main network's characteristics during the self-organization process of the culture. Our results point to the existence of a particular state corresponding to a small-world network configuration, in which several relevant graph's micro- and meso-scale properties emerge. Finally, we identify the main physical processes ruling the culture's morphological transformations, and embed them into a simplified growth model qualitatively reproducing the overall set of experimental observations.
Highlights
The issue of why and how an assembly of isolated neurons self-organizes to form a complex neural network is a fundamental problem [1,2,3]
Some previous studies highlighted the fact that the structuring of a neuronal cultured network before the attainment of its mature state is not random, being instead governed and characterized by processes eventually leading to configurations which are comparable to many other real complex networks [5]
The first significant result is the simultaneous increase in the clustering coefficient and decrease in the mean path length, a clear fingerprint of the emergence of a small-world network configuration
Summary
The issue of why and how an assembly of isolated (cultured) neurons self-organizes to form a complex neural network is a fundamental problem [1,2,3]. We experimentally investigate the self-organization into a network of an in vitro culture of neurons during the course of development, and explore the changes of the main topological features characterizing the anatomical connectivity between neurons during the associated network’s growth.
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