Fundamental rules for how the brain controls movements

Using the nematode as one test system, scientists at CCNR have spent the past several years understanding how a network controls itself—for instance, which individual neurons in the worm’s brain are in charge of a backward wiggle. In research published in Nature, they describe for the first time their ability to predict, test, and confirm with unprecedented detail how a nematode’s brain controls the way it moves.  Colleagues from Bill Schafer’s group at the LMB tested the predictions by killing individual neurons from the nematode brain with a laser.  They then measured the effects of these “microsurgeries” on behaviour. More…