Signal encoding performance of astrocyte-dressed Morris Lecar neurons

Abstract

There are more support cells called glia in the central nervous system than neurons. Although previous studies have shown that one of these glial cells, astrocytes, can communicate with neurons bidirectionally, giving a silent neuron the ability to fire or changing the neuron’s firing frequency, understanding the role of astrocytes in neuroscience is still in its infancy. With this motivation, in this study, the weak signal encoding performance of different types of astrocyte-dressed Morris Lecar neurons in the presence of noise naturally found in biological systems is systematically investigated. The results showed that astrocyte-dressed Morris Lecar neurons had a subthreshold signal frequency suitable for optimal encoding and that Morris Lecar neurons resonated at this frequency. In addition, the rate of inositol trisphosphate production in the astrocyte has been shown to affect signal detection at different noise intensities and coupling strengths. Finally, simulations performed by including the internal noise of the astrocytes originating from calcium ion channels in the model have shown how the signal transmission changes depending on the calcium channel number, noise intensity, and coupling strength. In this context, the presented study also contains important information in terms of examining stochastic astrocyte dynamics that affect the weak signal detection performance of different types of astrocyte-dressed Morris Lecar neurons.