Berlin 2018 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 66: Poster: Stat. Phys. (Gen., Critical Phen., Biol.)

DY 66.15: Poster

Donnerstag, 15. März 2018, 15:30–18:00, Poster A

Synaptic Miniature Transmitter Release:Random in Nature or Partly Deterministic? — •Daungruthai Jarukanont — University of Kassel, Kassel

The mechanism of how synaptic terminals release neurotransmitters by spontaneous vesicle fusion is still unclear. *Since the early work of Fatt and Katz (1952), the spontaneous release of neurotransmitters is assumed to be a purely stochastic process that occurs randomly and can be described by Poisson processes. In this work, we investigate the statistical behavior of the miniature excitatory postsynaptic currents (mEPSCs) in mouse Hippocampal neurons, and of the miniature excitatory junctional potentials(mEJPs) in the neuromuscular junctions (NMJ) of Drosophila larvae. We find that, in contrast to the previous assumptions, neither mEPSCs nor mEJPs could be described the Poisson process. Instead, the inter-event interval histograms of the mEPSCs from mouse Hippocampal neurons are well described by inverse-Gaussian distributions, while the inter-event interval histograms of mEJPs in the neuromuscular junctions of Drosophila larvae are well fitted by gamma distributions. Further study and analysis is still needed to understand the mechanism of the spontaneous release of neurotransmitter. However, it is clear from our analysis that the spontaneous release process is partly-deterministic and not random like as is currently assumed.