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. 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.
In an open-access report in the journal Cell, the team presents new brain-wide recordings and a mathematical model that accurately predicts the versatile ways that neurons represent the worm’s behaviors. Applying that model specifically to each cell, the team produced an atlas of how most cells, and the circuits they take part in, encode the animal’s actions. The atlas therefore reveals the underlying “logic” of how the worm’s brain produces a sophisticated and flexible repertoire of behaviors, even as its environmental circumstances change.
