Berlin 2008 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 3: Neuronal Systems
BP 3.3: Vortrag
Montag, 25. Februar 2008, 14:45–15:00, C 243
Fasciculation dynamics of sensory neurons — •Debasish Chaudhuri1, Peter Borowski2, Pradeep K. Mohanty3, and Martin Zapotocky1 — 1Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzer Strasse 38, 01187 Dresden, Germany — 2University of British Colombia, Vancouver, BC, Canada — 3Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata - 700064, India
Sensory neurons are typically spread out in the periphery, but their axons connect to precisely determined locations in the brain. In addition to graded guidance cues, axon-axon interactions can strongly influence this connectivity. To understand these effects in the intrinsically dynamic neural connectivity of, e.g., the mammalian olfactory system, we model the axons as a set of interacting directed random walkers with turnover. The growing axons form fascicles. In the steady state we obtain scaling, and the exact functional form of the fascicle size distribution. The auto-correlation time of the number of axons in a fascicle shows a crossover from a short time-scale which is the inverse of axonal death rates to a long time scale as the fascicle size grows. A set of effective rate equations in terms of dynamical variables characterizing fascicles (rather than individual axons) explains the time-scales qualitatively.