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. 2021 Sep 23;9(18):e15029. doi: 10.14814/phy2.15029

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© 2021 The Authors. Physiological Reports published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Physiological Society and the American Physiological Society

This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Astrocytes trigger burst firing in the masticatory CPG. (a) Anatomical organization of mastication. The main jaw opener (digastric muscle) and closer (masseter) are innervated by motoneurons from NVmot which receive inputs from NVsnpr. (b) Schematic representation of the cellular mechanism. Glutamate released from sensory trigeminal neurons activates astrocytic NMDA receptors in NVsnpr. This induces the secretion of S100ß via a Ca²⁺‐dependent mechanism. The resulting decrease in extracellular free Ca²⁺ promotes I_NaP and burst firing in neighbor neurons. NVsnpr: trigeminal main sensory nucleus. NVmot: trigeminal main motor nucleus. For details, see Morquette et al. (2015)