The Developmental Profile of Visual Cortex Astrocytes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
SUMMARY Though once thought of as passive support cells for neurons, it is now clear that astrocytes signal via calcium (Ca 2+ ) to trigger gliotransmission that impacts surrounding neurons and synapses. We therefore investigated how astrocytes in layer-5 (L5) mouse visual cortex mature electrophysiologically and morphologically over postnatal days (P) 3 – 30 and how these relate to changes in spontaneous Ca 2+ events. Across this age range, resting membrane potential increased, and input resistance decreased. Astrocytes also revealed different membrane responses to voltage steps: notably, membrane responses became more passive with age. Two-photon (2p) imaging of dye-loaded patched cells and confocal imaging revealed that gap-junction coupling increased starting around P7. Morphological reconstructions revealed increased branch density but also shorter branches after P20, suggesting that astrocyte branches may get pruned as dense tiling is established. Finally, we visualized spontaneous Ca 2+ transients with 2p microscopy and found that Ca 2+ events decorrelated, became more frequent as well as briefer with age. As astrocytes mature, spontaneous Ca 2+ activity thus changes from relatively cell-wide, synchronous waves to local transients. Several astrocyte properties were stably mature from ~P15 onwards, although morphology continued to develop further. Our findings provide a descriptive foundation of astrocyte maturation, useful for the study of astrocytic impact on visual cortex critical period plasticity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".