Large scale collective biological neural network dynamics.

Neural networks in vivo operate on a range of scales, with information thought to be carried by groups of neurons, and often traveling in waves of activity, such as gamma and delta waves. In this presentation we investigate which aspects of this collective behavior neural cells can recapitulate when they self-assemble into a network in vitro. For our studies, we record the activity of a self-assembled network of thousands of neural cells in one field of view via calcium imaging. Using the cross-correlation between pairs of cells, we link cells with high correlation in order to build a model of the network. We then investigate how the collective calcium activity and network properties change in neural models for aging and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD).