Neuroscience: As the worm turns

The worm turns on Helicobacter pylori.

How the Worm Turns, in Molecular Detail

Any behavior is, at its most elemental level, a coordinated series of muscle contractions. Those contractions are triggered by motor neurons, whose firing is controlled by other neurons, both excitatory and inhibitory, the whole chain set in motion by a stimulus. While the outlines of such a simple behavioral circuit have been understood for decades, the details— in particular, which neurotrans...

Muscular dystrophy: The worm turns to genetic disease

A new animal model for studying muscular dystrophy, a mutant form of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, brings the power of worm genetics to bear on the search for a cure for this disease; work on this worm has already led to the identification of a novel component that can suppress the mutant phenotype.

Anhydrobiosis: The Model Worm as a Model?

New work now shows that the dauer larvae of Caenorhabditis elegans can survive anhydrobiotically. The genetic tractability of this model organism may be useful in studying how organisms survive when losing most or all of their water.

Neuroinformatics as Explanatory Neuroscience

There are two points of view about the meaning of neuroinformatics, which wemay write neuro-Informatics and Neuro-informatics, to reflect their different emphases. The proponents of neuro-Informatics hold that it is the application of conventional informatics to the domain of neuroscience. By contrast, the proponents of Neuro-informatics hold that it studies information processing by nervous sy...