Lab News
“Scientists Created a Color-Coded Atlas of the Worm Nervous System”
For neuroscientists, the beauty of the C. elegans nematode lies in its simplicity: just 302 neurons comprise the tiny worm’s nervous system. Still, it can be hard to distinguish one type of a neuron from another. Or to know for sure that a neuron in one worm’s tail is identical
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“Over the brainbow with a new PAL”
Brains come in a variety of sizes. Several orders of magnitude separate the convoluted human brain from that of the fruit fly. But no matter the configuration, neuroscientists strive to study neurons in further and further detail, ideally at the single-cell level. However, consistently identifying individual neurons is not an
“Secrets of the Worm Nervous System Revealed by New Color Palette”
Earlier this year, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator Oliver Hobert and his colleagues reported a tool called NeuroPAL that color-codes individual neurons – allowing identification of all 302 neurons in living Caenorhabditis elegans worms.
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“A new color-coded map of the C. elegans nervous system”
The complete wiring diagram ─ or connectome ─ of the Caenorhabditis elegans nervous system was completed in 1986 by Sydney Brenner and colleagues who used electron microscope reconstruction to characterize the 302 neurons of the adult worm and hand-map all their connections.
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“Scientists Paint Multicolor Atlas of the Brain”
A novel technique developed by Columbia researchers known as NeuroPAL helps tease out the dynamics of neural networks in the nervous system of microscopic worms.