A calcium imaging pipeline to detect and quantify compound-specific effects in human and mouse astrocytes and astrocyte-neuron cocultures
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) March 20, 2026 Jeremy Krohn, Larissa Breuer, Susanne Wegmann et al.
Astrocytes support brain functions like energy metabolism and synapse formation, and their calcium signals indicate cellular health and activity. A simple automated calcium imaging pipeline was developed to measure astrocyte calcium responses in mouse monocultures, mouse astrocyte-neuron cocultures, and human astrocytes from two stem-cell lines. The pipeline detected changes in response to ATP (increased activity), CPA (decreased activity), glutamate, and LSD (decreased activity in mouse cocultured astrocytes but increased in human astrocytes). Human recombinant Tau oligomers, modeling Alzheimer's pathology, decreased activity in both mouse and human astrocytes. This tool enables rapid screening of compounds affecting astrocyte function.