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.
Reviewed by Danielle Ellis, B.Sc.Aug 21 2023 But after inventing new technologies and methods for the purpose, a team of scientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT has produced a rigorous accounting of the neurons in the tractably tiny brain of a humble C. elegans worm, mapping out how its brain cells encode almost all of its essential behaviors, such as movement and feeding.
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. Data analysis revealed three novel observations about neural activity in the worm: Neurons track behavior not only of the present moment but also the recent past; they tune their encoding of behaviors, such as motion, based on a surprising variety of factors; and many neurons simultaneously encode multiple behaviors.
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. "It allowed us to complete the circuits," he said. "Our hope is that as our colleagues study aspects of neural circuit function, they can refer to this atlas to obtain a fairly complete view of the key neurons involved."
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