An extremely rich repertoire of bursting patterns during the development of cortical cultures

Abstract

Dissociated cultures of cortical cells exhibited a much richer repertoire of activity patterns than previously reported. Except for the very sparsest cultures, all cultures exhibited globally synchronized bursts, but bursting patterns changed over the course of development, and varied considerably between preparations. This emphasizes the importance of using multiple preparations--not just multiple cultures from one preparation--in any study involving neuronal cultures. These results are based on 963 half-hour-long recordings. To encourage further investigation of the rich range of behaviors exhibited by cortical cells in vitro, we are making the data available to other researchers, together with Matlab code to facilitate access.