Researchers model and map how neurons across the tiny brain of a C. elegans worm encode its behaviors, revealing many new insights about the robustness and flexibility of its nervous system.
To understand the full relationship between brain activity and behavior, scientists have needed a way to map this relationship for all of the neurons across a whole brain -- a so far insurmountable challenge.
Graduate students Jungsoo Kim and Adam Atanas, who each earned their PhDs this spring for the research, are the study's co-lead authors. They've also made all their data, and the findings of their model and atlas, freely available to fellow researchers at a website called the WormWideWeb.
For example, while the behavior of wriggling around one's little laboratory dish might seem like a very simple act, neurons represented factors such as speed, steering, and whether the worm is eating or not. In some cases they represented the animal's motion spanning back in time by about a minute. By encoding recent, rather than just current motion, these neurons could help the worm compute how its past actions influenced its current outcome.
In fitting the model, the research team used a probabilistic modeling approach that allowed them to understand how certain they were about each fit model parameter, an approach pioneered by co-author Vikash Mansinghka, a principal research scientist who leads MIT's Probabilistic Computing Project.In creating a model that could quantify and predict how any brain cell would represent behavior, the team initially gathered data from neurons without tracking the cells' specific identities.
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