2023-08-25 14:45:49
To understand the full relationship between brain activity and the behavior that results from it, there has always been a need for a way to map the effect of each and every neuron in the brain on behavior, a hitherto insurmountable challenge, especially if the brain to be investigated is from a human or other complex animal.
But after devising a series of methods and new technologies for this purpose, scientists have managed to accurately and accurately count the neurons in the brain of a Caenorhabditis elegans worm, tracking how its brain cells encode nearly all of the animal’s essential behaviors. such as those related to body movements and those linked to the act of eating.
The team that has achieved this is made up of, among others, Adam Atanas and Steven Flavell, both from the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.
Atanas, Flavell, and their colleagues have obtained whole-brain recordings of Caenorhabditis elegans and created a mathematical model that accurately predicts the ways in which neurons represent the worm’s behaviors.
By applying that model specifically to each cell, the team produced an atlas of how most cells and the circuits they participate in code the animal’s actions.
To determine how each neuron in an animal’s brain influences its behavior, the researchers automatically tracked each behavior in the brain of a Caenorhabditis elegans worm. Here, the head is labeled with colored dots which made it easy to follow. In other observations they were also able to track the activity of each neuron. Taken together, all these measurements allowed them to build what could be described as an atlas of the brain and the behavior governed by it. (Image: Flavell Lab/Picower Institute)
Thus, the atlas reveals the underlying “logic” in how the worm’s brain produces a sophisticated and flexible repertoire of behaviors.
The study is titled “Brain-wide representations of behavior spanning multiple timescales and states in C. elegans.” And it has been published in the academic journal Cell. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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