Abstract
Astrocytes are cells of the central nervous system that are essential to brain function, from synaptogenesis to higher-brain functions such as memory and learning. A single astrocyte can contact hundreds of thousands of synapses, potentially orchestrating information integration and transmission within various neural circuits simultaneously. Yet, the mechanisms that govern astrocyte function and neuron-astrocyte communication remain poorly understood. Astrocytes communicate with neighboring cells through Ca2+ signals that display complex, diverse spatio-temporal characteristics. These signals are essential to astrocyte function and are altered in most brain disorders. Because the majority of astrocytic
Ca2+ signals are confined into small compartments that cannot be resolved with diffraction-limited light microscopy, the functional implications of such diverse signals are still poorly understood. To overcome these limitations, we develop computational approaches to study astrocyte activity at the nanoscale. This talk will present an overview of our recent work studying the functional link between the complex astrocyte morphology and local signaling at the nanoscale. We hope that the models, software, and 3D meshes resulting from this work, provided in open-access, will contribute to the global effort to elucidate the roles of astrocytes in health and disease.
Biography
Audrey Denizot is a tenured research scientist in the AIstroSight team at Inria Lyon in France. After her training as a biologist at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, she received her PhD in computational neuroscience at INSA Lyon, France, followed by a postdoc at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan. The main goal of her research is to better understand how astrocytes contribute to brain function in various (patho-)physiological conditions. Her work has mainly focused on microdomain calcium signaling in perisynaptic astrocytic processes and how the complex astrocyte nano-morphology impacts local signaling.