A Compartmental Model to Investigate Local and Global Ca(2+) Dynamics in Astrocytes

Intracellular Ca(2+) dynamics in astrocytes can be triggered by neuronal activity and in turn regulate a variety of downstream processes that modulate neuronal function. In this fashion, astrocytic Ca(2+) signaling is regarded as a processor of neural network activity by means of complex spatial and temporal Ca(2+) dynamics. Accordingly, a key step is to understand how different patterns of neural activity translate into spatiotemporal dynamics of intracellular Ca(2+) in astrocytes. Here, we introduce a minimal compartmental model for astrocytes that can qualitatively reproduce essential hierarchical features of spatiotemporal Ca(2+) dynamics in astrocytes. We find that the rate of neuronal firing determines the rate of Ca(2+) spikes in single individual processes as well as in the soma of the cell, while correlations of incoming neuronal activity are important in determining the rate of “global” Ca(2+) spikes that can engulf soma and the majority of processes. Significantly, our model predicts that whether the endoplasmic reticulum is shared between soma and processes or not determines the relationship between the firing rate of somatic Ca(2+) events and the rate of neural network activity. Together these results provide intuition about how neural activity in combination with inherent cellular properties shapes spatiotemporal astrocytic Ca(2+) dynamics, and provide experimentally testable predictions.