Reverse engineering neural control of movement in Hydra

Schedule
Wednesday, October 7, 2020
06:00 UTC
Adrienne Fairhall

Dr

University of Washington

Host: Systems Neuroecology

Event Information

Host

Systems Neuroecology

Duration

70 minutes

Abstract

Hydra is a fascinating model organism for neuroscience. It is transparent; new genetic lines allow one to image activity in both neurons (Dupre and Yuste, 2017) and muscle cells (Szymanski and Yuste, 2019) ; it exhibits rich behavior, and it continually rebuilds itself. Hydra’s fairly simply physical structure as a two-layered fluid-filled hydrostat and the accessibility of information about neural and muscle activity opens the possibility of a complete model of neural control of behavior. This requires understanding the transformations that occur in the muscle cell layers and a biomechanical model of the body column. We show that we can use this modeling to reverse engineer how neural activity drives behavior.

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