Some quantifying measures for the circadian activity in the mammalian SCN

ROMÁN M; NIETO PS; GARBARINO PICO E; TAMARIT FA

Congreso; Latin American Symposium on Chronobiology; 2013

The braincells comprising the SCN (suprachiasmatic nuclei) in mammals are diverse and function in a coordinate fashion in order to drive physiological and behavioral rhythms, as they are able to communicate with each other, sync their activity and hence become -as a whole- a biological clock both precise and robust. But although the SCN cells function in a unified manner when coupled, they are not perfectly synchronous: in fact, the expression of clock genes within a slice displays a consistent (non-random) spatio-temporal pattern. The mechanisms by which these phase relationships are established depend on the integration of multiple intercellular signals present in the SCN. Quantifying these biological processes, through the usage of mathematical measures and models, could aid in clarifying the inner mechanisms of the SCN. In this work we use a model of circadian cellular oscillators coupled through different network architectures, to simulate the dynamical behavior observed in SCN slices. Some quantifying measures are proposed to characterize the emerging dynamical behavior in the model. We observe that, when these metrics are taken in consideration regarding the euclidean distance between network nodes, they reflect different profiles, having their origin in the underlying network topology. We posit that these metrics can be applied to experimental time-series from SCN slices in order to quantitatively characterize their spatio-temporal organization and potentially can be used as a tool to elucidate the functional connectivity.