{"id":32382,"date":"2021-11-19T00:00:07","date_gmt":"2021-11-19T08:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vermont.salk.edu\/?post_type=disclosure&p=32382"},"modified":"2021-11-19T10:44:37","modified_gmt":"2021-11-19T18:44:37","slug":"reading-the-mind-of-a-worm","status":"publish","type":"disclosure","link":"https:\/\/www.salk.edu\/es\/news-release\/reading-the-mind-of-a-worm\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading the mind of a worm"},"content":{"rendered":"

LA JOLLA\u2014It sounds like a party trick: scientists can now look at the brain activity of a tiny worm and tell you which chemical the animal smelled a few seconds before. But the findings of a new study, led by Salk Associate Professor Sreekanth Chalasani<\/a>, are more than just a novelty; they help the scientists better understand how the brain functions and integrates information.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found some unexpected things when we started looking at the effect of these sensory stimuli on individual cells and connections within the worms\u2019 brains,\u201d says Chalasani, member of the Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory and senior author of the new work, published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology<\/em><\/a> on November 9, 2021.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The neurons of the worm function differently when tasting salt. Each circle represents a neuron, and the connections between the circles are synapses. The scientists used graph theory to group some neurons into modules, which are identified by their colors. The number of modules was reduced to 5 (from 7) when the salt stimulus was presented to the worm. This signifies that these neurons are particularly important when the animal tastes salt.
Haga clic aqu\u00ed<\/a> para obtener una imagen en alta resoluci\u00f3n.
Cr\u00e9dito: Instituto Salk<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Chalasani is interested in how, at a cellular level, the brain processes information from the outside world. Researchers can\u2019t simultaneously track the activity of each of the 86 billion brain cells in a living human\u2014but they can do this in the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans<\/em>, which has only 302 neurons. Chalasani explains that in a simple animal like C. elegans<\/em>, researchers can monitor individual neurons as the animal is carrying out actions. That level of resolution is not currently possible in humans or even mice.<\/p>\n

Chalasani\u2019s team set out to study how C. elegans <\/em>neurons react to smelling each of five different chemicals: benzaldehyde, diacetyl, isoamyl alcohol, 2-nonanone, and sodium chloride. Previous studies have shown that C. elegans<\/em> can differentiate these chemicals, which, to humans, smell roughly like almond, buttered popcorn, banana, cheese, and salt. And while researchers know the identities of the small handful of sensory neurons that directly sense these stimuli, Chalasani\u2019s group was more interested in how the rest of the brain reacts.<\/p>\n

The researchers engineered C. elegans <\/em>so that each of their 302 neurons contained a fluorescent sensor that would light up when the neuron was active. Then, they watched under a microscope as they exposed 48 different worms to repeated bursts of the five chemicals. On average, 50 or 60 neurons activated in response to each chemical.<\/p>\n

\"Sreekanth
Sreekanth Chalasani
Haga clic aqu\u00ed<\/a> para obtener una imagen en alta resoluci\u00f3n.
Cr\u00e9dito: Instituto Salk<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By looking at basic properties of the datasets\u2014such as how many cells were active at each time point\u2014Chalasani and his colleagues couldn\u2019t immediately differentiate between the different chemicals. So, they turned to a mathematical approach called graph theory, which analyzes the collective interactions between pairs of cells: When one cell is activated, how does the activity of other cells change in response?<\/p>\n

This approach revealed that whenever C. elegans<\/em> was exposed to sodium chloride (salt), there was first a burst of activity in one set of neurons\u2014likely the sensory neurons\u2014but then about 30 second later, triplets of other neurons began to strongly coordinate their activities. These same distinct triplets weren\u2019t seen after the other stimuli, letting the researchers accurately identify\u2014based only on the brain patterns\u2014when a worm had been exposed to salt.<\/p>\n

\u201cC. elegans <\/em>seems to have attached a high value to sensing salt, using a completely different circuit configuration in the brain to respond,\u201d says Chalasani. \u201cThis might be because salt often represents bacteria, which is food for the worm.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers next used a machine-learning algorithm to pinpoint other, more subtle, differences in how the brain responded to each of the five chemicals. The algorithm was able to learn to differentiate the neural response to salt and benzaldehyde but often confused the other three chemicals.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever analysis we\u2019ve done, it\u2019s a start but we\u2019re still only getting a partial answer as to how the brain discriminates these things,\u201d says Chalasani.<\/p>\n

Still, he points out that the way the team approached the study\u2014looking at the brain\u2019s network-wide response to a stimulus, and applying graph theory, rather than just focusing on a small set of sensory neurons and whether they\u2019re activated\u2014paves the way toward more complex and holistic studies of how brains react to stimuli.<\/p>\n

The researchers\u2019 ultimate goal, of course, isn\u2019t to read the minds of microscopic worms, but to gain a deeper understanding of how humans encode information in the brain and what happens when this goes awry in sensory processing disorders and related conditions like anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorders (ADHD), autism spectrum disorders and others.<\/p>\n

The other authors of the new study were Saket Navlakha of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Javier How of UC San Diego. The work was supported by grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.<\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":32529,"template":"","faculty":[77],"disease-research":[124],"class_list":["post-32382","disclosure","type-disclosure","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","faculty-sreekanth-chalasani","disease-research-neuroscience-and-neurological-disorders"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReading the mind of a worm - Salk Institute for Biological Studies<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.salk.edu\/es\/news-release\/reading-the-mind-of-a-worm\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"es_MX\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reading the mind of a worm - Salk Institute for Biological Studies\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"LA JOLLA\u2014It sounds like a party trick: scientists can now look at the brain activity of a tiny worm and tell you which chemical the animal smelled a few seconds before. 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