ASTROCYTE NETWORK DYNAMICS IN THE PREFRONTAL CORTEX, SECONDARY SOMATOSENSORY CORTEX, AND HIPPOCAMPUS

Astrocytes respond to neuronal activity through intracellular calcium signaling, providing a reliable readout of underlying neuronal network dynamics across multiple brain regions. While calcium dynamics in individual astrocytes have been extensively characterized, the organization of astrocytic networks remains poorly understood. In this work, we characterize the functional dynamics and topological organization of astrocyte populations in the hippocampus, somatosensory cortex, and prefrontal cortex using calcium imaging combined with graph theory. We use male C57BL6/J mice (3 months old) that were injected into the PrL, S2 cortex and hippocampus with AAV5-GFAP-GCaMP6f to do calcium imaging in anesthetized animals using a one-photon miniscope. We applied dynamic graph theory to spontaneous calcium activity to characterize functional connectivity and temporal evolution in astrocytic networks using sliding-window correlations to quantify topological reconfiguration across brain regions. Our results show that astrocyte network size, topology and dynamics exhibit distinct regional specificities.
Acknowledgments: work funded by PAPIIT-DGAPA IN217225, CONAHCYT PhD scholarship 788790 (A.R.V.).