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| In vitro primary cultures of dissociated invertebrate neurons from locust ganglia are used to experimentally investigate the morphological evolution of assemblies of living neurons, as they self-organize from collections of separated cells into elaborated, clustered, networks. At all the different stages of the culture development, identification of the locations of neurons and neurites by means of a dedicated software allows to ultimately extract an adjacency matrix from each image of the culture. In turn, a systematic statistical analysis of a group of topological observables grants us the possibility of quantifying
and tracking the progression of the main network's characteristics during the self-organization process of the culture. Our
results point to the existence of a particular state corresponding to a small-world network configuration, in which several
relevant graph's micro and mesoscale properties emerge. Finally, we identify the main physical processes ruling the
culture's morphological transformations, and embed them into a simplified growth model qualitatively reproducing the
overall set of experimental observations. |
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