As pointed out by the BRAIN Initiative Advisory Committee, the psychiatric illnesses that devastate individual lives and families, and cost society billions of dollars annually, cause their damage by disrupting neural circuits. We use the microscopic nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a biological breadboard for developing computational algorithms and experimental strategies for understanding and predicting how neural circuits generate behaviors. The sheer complexity of the human brain (over 80,000,000,000 neurons and 100,000,000,000,000 connections) makes understanding its function a formidable challenge. In contrast, the fully mapped C. elegans's nervous system has only 302 neurons and 7300 connections, making it the closest biological analog to an electronic circuitboard. Despite its relative simplicity compared to humans, C. elegans exhibits many complex behaviors including exploration, social behavior, and learning.
We have prototyped a diverse set of genetically-encoded light and chemical-activated tools for manipulating and perturbing the activity of individual C. elegans neurons. To comprehensively measure behaviors as they change over time, we have developed a software suite for tracking dozens of animals simultaneously for a spectrum of locomotion behaviors. We are using these tools to experimentally test algorithms for reverse-engineering the nervous system. Our goal is that the experimental methods and computational algorithms we develop using C. elegans can be applied to more complex nervous systems, including, ultimately, human patients.
We have prototyped a diverse set of genetically-encoded light and chemical-activated tools for manipulating and perturbing the activity of individual C. elegans neurons. To comprehensively measure behaviors as they change over time, we have developed a software suite for tracking dozens of animals simultaneously for a spectrum of locomotion behaviors. We are using these tools to experimentally test algorithms for reverse-engineering the nervous system. Our goal is that the experimental methods and computational algorithms we develop using C. elegans can be applied to more complex nervous systems, including, ultimately, human patients.
