Spontaneous Functional Recovery after Focal Damage in Neuronal Cultures

Damage in biological neuronal networks triggers a complex functional reorganization whose mechanisms are still poorly understood. To delineate this reorganization process, here we investigate the functional alterations of in vitro rat cortical circuits following localized laser ablation. The analysis of the functional network configuration before and after ablation allowed us to quantify the extent of functional alterations and the characteristic spatial and temporal scales along recovery. We observed that damage precipitated a fast rerouting of information flow that restored network’s communicability in about 15 min. Functional restoration was led by the immediate neighbors around trauma but was orchestrated by the entire network. Our in vitro setup exposes the ability of neuronal circuits to articulate fast responses to acute damage, and may serve as a proxy to devise recovery strategies in actual brain circuits. Moreover, this biological setup can become a benchmark to empirically test network theories about the spontaneous recovery in dynamical networks.