All Articles Tagged As: caenorhabditis elegans
Tiny roundworms called Caenorhabditis elegans have a rather uncomplicated method for finding food: They wriggle and turn and explore new territory until they find something edible, and then they stay the course until the food disappears. But despite the worm's simple nervous system, researchers have been unable to figure out exactly how a stimulus such as food odor gets converted into a more complex, long-lasting behavior like foraging. Now, using tools borrowed from the computer industry, Rockefeller University researchers have created tiny devices that allow them to watch in real time as information travels from one worm neuron to another. Their findings - that one of the long-studied olfactory neurons has a totally different mode of operation than expected - uncover a surprising similarity between the worm's neural network and our own.
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