Journal
CEREBRAL CORTEX
Volume 25, Issue 10, Pages 3743-3757Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhu252
Keywords
cluster; community; hub; microconnectome; networks
Categories
Funding
- JSPS Research Abroad from MEXT (The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology)
- NSF [0904912, 1058291]
- Direct For Computer & Info Scie & Enginr
- Div Of Information & Intelligent Systems [0904912] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien
- Division Of Physics [1058291] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Although relationships between networks of different scales have been observed in macroscopic brain studies, relationships between structures of different scales in networks of neurons are unknown. To address this, we recorded from up to 500 neurons simultaneously from slice cultures of rodent somatosensory cortex. We then measured directed effective networks with transfer entropy, previously validated in simulated cortical networks. These effective networks enabled us to evaluate distinctive nonrandom structures of connectivity at 2 different scales. We have 4 main findings. First, at the scale of 3-6 neurons (clusters), we found that high numbers of connections occurred significantly more often than expected by chance. Second, the distribution of the number of connections per neuron (degree distribution) had a long tail, indicating that the network contained distinctively high-degree neurons, or hubs. Third, at the scale of tens to hundreds of neurons, we typically found 2-3 significantly large communities. Finally, we demonstrated that communities were relatively more robust than clusters against shuffling of connections. We conclude the microconnectome of the cortex has specific organization at different scales, as revealed by differences in robustness. We suggest that this information will help us to understand how the microconnectome is robust against damage.
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