Changing behavior through synaptic engineering
Date: 14.9.2015
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School are the first to show that it's possible to reverse the behavior of an animal by flipping a switch in neuronal communication.
The research, published in PLOS Biology, provides a new approach for studying the neural circuits that govern behavior and has important implications for how scientists think about neural connectomes.
The neuronal roadmap, or connectome, however, doesn't include information about the activity of neurons or the signals they transmit. How stable are these neural circuits in the brain? Does their wiring constrain the flow of information or the behaviors they control? The complexity of the human brain makes it almost impossible to address these questions.
Mark Alkema, PhD, associate professor of neurobiology at UMass Medical School turned to the nematode C. elegans to find answers. A tiny worm with only 302 neurons, it is the only animal for which its neural road map has been completely defined.
In this study, Alkema and colleagues sought to determine if flipping the sign of a synapse from inhibitory to excitatory in the worm's brain was enough to reverse a behavior. To do this, they analyzed nematode touch response which C. elegans employ to escape from carnivorous fungi that use hyphal nooses to catch nematodes.
