OpenWorm Journal Club: Body Language of a Worm скачать в хорошем качестве

OpenWorm Journal Club: Body Language of a Worm

Brains.  What are they good for?  Moving bodies.  But how do we figure out what body movements are made by what brain signals?  By taking video of the behavior of an animal, you’d be surprised how scientists can break down behavior into a language of patterns!  At the next OpenWorm Journal Club, hear Dr. Andre Brown as he tells us how he does that with our friendly C. elegans! Technology for recording neural activity is advancing rapidly, and whole-brain imaging with single neuron resolution has already been demonstrated for smaller animals. To interpret such complex neural recordings, we need comprehensive behaviour characterizations, which are the brain’s principal output. Animal tracking can increasingly be automated, but an outstanding challenge is finding ways to represent these behavioural data. We have focused on the movement of the nematode worm C. elegans to develop a quantitative representation of behaviour as a series of distinct postures. Each posture is analogous to a word in a language and so we can directly count the number of phrases that makes up the C. elegans behavioural repertoire. C. elegans has a very small nervous system but we find that its behavioural repertoire is still complex. As with human languages, there is a large number of possible phrases, but most are rarely used. When comparing worm populations or environments, we find that the difference between their behaviour is due to a subset of their entire repertoire. In the language analogy, these would correspond to idiomatic phrases that distinguish groups of speakers. A quantitative understanding of the nature of behavioural variation will inform research on the function and evolution of neural circuits. Relevant paper for the talk is: Hierarchical compression of C. elegans locomotion reveals phenotypic differences in the organisation of behaviour Alex Gomez-Marin, Greg J Stephens, Andre EX Brown bioRxiv doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/029462