Often a specialized physiological task, like control of nutrient storage, is entrusted to a limited number of cells in our body. When this cell task force fails we can face a serious health problem. An appropriate example is insulin-secreting tissue organized into groups or islets of beta-cells scattered within pancreas. Electrical activity in beta-cells exhibits a characteristic bursting pattern, which consists of slow oscillations in membrane potential between a depolarized plateau, on which calcium action potentials are superimposed, and a hyperpolarized electrically silent interval. The gap junctional coupling between pancreatic beta-cells is critical for synchronous glucose-dependent insuling secretion and bursting electrical activity. While the heterogeneity of beta-cells was shown to be important in modelling of electrical response of coupled beta-cell clusters most models consider only nearest neighbors coupling between the cells in specified geometries thus excluding any paracrine effects.

Here we take a different route and propose to introduce coupling between beta-cells based on the spatially embedded complex network cytoarchitecture model of an intact living islet. We used a fitness network model approach to construct complex networks connecting the beta-cells based on their electrophysiological state representing the ability to communicate with other beta-cells in the islet. The physiology of beta-cells was studied in cytoarchitectural intact islets using pancreas slice method. Under fixed electrophysiological conditions bursting oscillations of the membrane potential of beta-cells were computed in islets modeled as regular lattices with nearest neighbor interactions and as networks with complex topologies. We show that long range communication between beta-cells emerging from the scale-free topology of the islet cytoarchitecture can have important consequences for the beta-cells bursting patterns.