The Plastic Glial-Synaptic Dynamics within the Neuropil: A Self-Organizing System Composed of Polyelectrolytes in Phase Transition

Figure 1

Experiment with the B-Z system. Clockwise: (a) the catalyzer ferroin was fixed in silica gel. One hour after covering the gel with the reactants, several centers begin to create propagating circular waves that cause annihilation of each other upon collision. The whole Petri dish (10 cm diameter) is filled with the self-organized spatiotemporal pattern; (b) detail of another experiment showing the temporal evolution of the B-Z system using water as solvent; (c) experiment of B-Z in gel in which deuterium was used as solvent. Only about one-third of the Petri dish is occupied by the propagating waves. The grid overlaying the dish has 2.0 cm spacing. A few reactive centers send waves that died out long before reaching the border of the Petri dish. The waves become “fuzzy” and disappear. The propagation velocity was five times slower than the ones in the water gel. The deuterium systems also were short-lived compared to the water systems. The results suggest the importance of dissociated water in the B-Z system (figure modified from [28]).

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(b)

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