Glial cells for information routing?

We investigate a possible functional role of glial cells as information routing devices of the cerebral cortex. On the one hand, functionally motivated models of neural information processing were lately suggested which rely on short-term changes of connections between neural modules to dynamically route neural activity. Although successful in practice, the routing mechanisms of these models require synaptic efficacy control of large sets of synapses that is difficult to implement neurally. On the other hand, recent experiments show an active role of glial cells (astrocytes) in the interaction with large numbers of synapses. Astrocytes are sensitive to neurotransmitters released by the presynaptic terminal and in turn can influence synaptic efficacy by release of so called gliotransmitters. An analysis of the most recent literature shows that glial cells are a well-suited and natural candidate for the implementation of information routing mechanisms. (c) 2006 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.