It has a brain! The nematode, Caenorhabditis
elegans! Who knew? Actually, I’d never
even thought about it before but it turns out that this worm has a brain with 302 neurons
connected by approximately 8000 synapses. Austrian scientists were able to
identify and record the activity of this worm’s brain with high remporal and
spatial resolution. Hmmm. Who knew? Supposedly
it is the only creature for which a complete nervous system has been
anatomically mapped. According to neurobiologist Tina Schrodel of, the neurons
in the worm’s head were so densely packed that they could not distinguish them
on the first images. Visualizing the neurons required tagging them with a
fluorescent protein that lights up when it binds to calcium, signaling the
nerve cells’ activity. With this new kind of microscopy, they were able to
record the activity of 70% of the nerve cells in a worm’s head with high
spatial and temporal resolution. This new technique, based on “sculpting” the
three-dimensional distribution of light in the brain, may open up the way for
experiments that were not possible before. One of the questions that will be
addressed is how the brain processes sensory information to “plan” specific
movements and then executes them.
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