{"id":86,"date":"2021-08-07T03:38:31","date_gmt":"2021-08-06T18:38:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/?page_id=86"},"modified":"2023-02-14T15:34:13","modified_gmt":"2023-02-14T06:34:13","slug":"research","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/en\/research\/","title":{"rendered":"Research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How Does Nervous System Perform Computations?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The animal brain is the most complex information processing system in any living organism. To understand how real nervous systems perform computations is one of the fundamental goals of neuroscience. Neural activation with stimulation should propagate through the neural circuits and induce behavioral responses. We want to understand how the environmental information is encoded in the neural activities and interacts with the internal states of the neural circuits. Measuring whole-brain activity and behavior will be important in revealing information processing mechanisms.
Animals move to their preferred environment based on the smells and sounds of their surroundings. Such navigation behaviors are suitable for clarifying the mechanism of information processing in neural circuits because the input-output relationship is clear: the organism senses the external environment, selects the necessary information, and outputs the processing result as a behavior (Fig. 1).
We use the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans in our research. The worms remember salt concentration at which they were cultivated with food, and they migrate to the region of the specific concentration in an environment with a salt concentration gradient. The neurons and their connections in the worm have been studied in detail (Fig. 2). However, even in the organism with the most extensive fundamental information in neuroscience, how each neuron processes information to produce behavior is not well understood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 1: Overview<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Fig. 2: Neuronal nuclei in the head region of the worm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Whole-Brain Activity Imaging<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We thought that simultaneous measurement of whole-brain activity with single-cell resolution will be the key-techniques in revealing information processing mechanisms. Since the body of the nematode is small and transparent, we can measure the neural activity of living animals under the fluorescent microscopes with microfluidic devices. We have developed experimental techniques such as 4D microscope (Fig. 3), which allows us to simultaneously observe the all neurons in the head region of the worm, and image analysis methods to extract neural activity from volumetric time-lapse movies (Movie 1). We have also developed a cell identification method that maps individual cells in the movies to known nerves in order to compare the extracted neural activities among individuals and map them to neural circuits. By integrating these techniques, we have achieved the whole-brain activity imaging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 3: 4D microscope<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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