Computational Power of Astrocytes and their Role in Neurobiology

It was considered previously that the behaviour of mammals was exclusively determined by the activity of neurons, while other brain cells such as astrocytes only offer support for neurons. Based on recent discoveries, the astrocytes have an important role in neurobiology. In particular, the astrocytes producing calcium are able to modulate neurotransmissions. Inspired by these connections between astrocytes and neurons, we define a formal model and show that under certain constrains this model has the same computational power as a Turing machine, being computationally complete.