Unravelling Beta Cell Populations in Pancreatic Islets: A Network Analysis Perspective on Collective Activity

Insulin secreting beta cells within the pancreatic islets of Langerhans form a complex syncytium with non-trivially interconnected elements that are intrinsically nonlinear and highly heterogeneous. The nature of their collective activity and synchronized behavior, which is essential for a regulated hormone release, is therefore difficult to understand. Computational tools developed in the field of network science have proven out to be one of the key pillars for assessing the connectivity patterns between beta cells and the physiological significance of those interactions. In the seminar I shall provide an accessible introduction to the basic principles of the network theory, describe how the networks are constructed from the recorded cellular dynamics, and highlight the recent findings obtained my means of advanced multicellular imaging techniques supported by network-based analyses. The current results indicate that the extracted functional beta cell networks exhibit small-worldness, a clustered structure with well-pronounced subcompartments, and a small fraction of well-connected (hub) cells. Most importantly, the proposed methodology does not only ease the identification of functional subpopulations that orchestrate the collective rhythm but also offers a largely untapped potential to explore changes associated with disease and aging at the tissue level. Finally, I will conclude with outlining challenges offered by the multilayer network formalism in exploring the collective activity of islet cell populations and how these methodological approaches can be applied in biomedical research even beyond the pancreatic islets.