Controlling the spontaneous firing behavior of a neuron with astrocyte

TL;DR

This paper explores how astrocytes influence neuronal firing patterns, demonstrating their role in inducing multistability and controlling irregular and burst firing behaviors in neurons through a combined neuron-astrocyte model.

Contribution

It introduces a model showing astrocytes can regulate neuron firing modes and provides insights into the mechanisms behind this control, highlighting astrocytes' active role in neural dynamics.

Findings

Astrocytes induce multistability in neuron firing modes.

Astrocytes can control irregular and burst firing statistics.

Mechanisms of astrocyte influence on neuron dynamics are identified.

Abstract

Mounting evidence in recent years suggests that astrocytes, a sub-type of glial cells, not only serve metabolic and structural support for neurons and synapses but also play critical roles in regulation of proper functioning of the nervous system. In this work, we investigate the effect of astrocyte on the spontaneous firing activity of a neuron through a combined model which includes a neuron-astrocyte pair. First, we show that an astrocyte may provide a kind of multistability in neuron dynamics by inducing different firing modes such as random and bursty spiking. Then, we identify the underlying mechanism of this behavior and search for the astrocytic factors that may have regulatory roles in different firing regimes. More specifically, we explore how an astrocyte can participate in occurrence and control of spontaneous irregular spiking activity of a neuron in random spiking mode. Additionally, we systematically investigate the bursty firing regime dynamics of the neuron under the variation of biophysical facts related to the intracellular environment of the astrocyte. It is found that an astrocyte coupled to a neuron can provide a control mechanism for both spontaneous firing irregularity and burst firing statistics, i.e., burst regularity and size.