Bioinformatics Advance Access published online on April 23, 2009
Bioinformatics, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp271
Systematic analysis of synchronized oscillatory neuronal net-works reveals the enrichment of coupled direct and indirect feed-back motifs

1Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), 335 Gwahangno, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 305-701, Republic of Korea
2School of Electrical Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, 136-713, Republic of Korea
3School of Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia University of Technology, Huhhot, 010051, China
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Prof. Kwang-Hyun Cho, E-mail: ckh{at}kaist.ac.kr, ckh-sb{at}snu.ac.kr
| Abstract |
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Motivation: Synchronized bursting behavior is a remarkable phenomenon in neural dynamics. So, identification of the underlying functional structure is crucial to understand its regulatory mechanism at a system-level. On the other hand, we noted that feedback loops are commonly used basic building blocks in engineering circuit design, especially for synchronization, and they have also been considered as important regulatory network motifs in systems biology. From these motivations, we have investigated the relationship between synchronized bursting behavior and feedback motifs in neural net-works.
Results: Through extensive simulations of synthetic spike oscillation models, we found that a particular structure of feedback loops, coupled direct and indirect positive feedback loops, can induce robust synchronized bursting behaviors. To further investigate this, we have developed a novel feedback loop identification method based on sampled time-series data and applied it to synchronized spiking records measured from cultured neural networks of rat by using multi-electrode array. As a result, we have identified coupled direct and indirect positive feedback loops.
Conclusion: We therefore conclude that coupled direct and indirect positive feedback loops might be an important design principle that causes the synchronized bursting behavior of neuronal networks although an extrapolation of this result to in vivo brain dynamics still remains as a further study.
Contact: ckh{at}kaist.ac.kr (K.-H. Cho)
Supplementary Material: Supplementary Material is available at Bioinformatics online.
Associate Editor: Dr. Jonathan Wren
Received on February 7, 2009; revised on April 3, 2009; accepted on April 18, 2009
Co-correspondence.