Irregular calcium oscillations in the striatum: How to characterize the phenomena?

Abstract

We have found the long-lasting slow Ca²⁺ oscillation, which lasted up to about 300 s, in the striatal neurons and astrocytes. Depletion of the intracellular Ca²⁺ store and the antagonization of IP3 receptors blocked the slow Ca²⁺ oscillations. The application of an antagonist against mGluR5 also blocked the slow Ca²⁺ oscillations in both putative-neurons and astrocytes. Thus, the mGluR5-IP3 signal cascade is the primary contributor to the slow Ca²⁺ oscillation in both putative-neurons and astrocytes.The Ca²⁺ oscillation must involve in the neuronal information processing, because metabotropic receptors play roles in the neural modulation. However, there are difficulties for extracting the feature and the information from the Ca²⁺ oscillations, because of following reasons; 1: It is difficult to extract the region of the cell from a low contrast fluorescence image. 2: It is difficult to extract the feature and the information of the Ca2+ oscillation from the irregular time-series data. In this presentation, I would like to discuss how to analyze the time-series fluorescence image and how to extract the feature of the slow Ca²⁺ oscillations.