Annabelle Tran & Dr. Gareth Harris
Abstract
The nervous system is composed of functions, including sensory and motor systems necessary for processing environmental stimuli. The interaction between the systems allows us to filter important environmental cues and achieve everyday behaviors, including coordination, movement, nociception, and awareness. Thus, defects in motor outputs are associated with debilitating neurological disorders, including ALS, Myasthenia gravis, Parkinson’s disease, and Huntington’s disease. These diseases frequently disrupt the transmission of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine resulting in motor output dysfunction (Tata et al., 2014). Though these mechanisms are highly critical, the processes are not fully understood. Therefore, insight into these disrupted motor systems may provide future avenues to manipulate and restore these systems.
We investigate this paradigm by observing behavior in the worm C. elegans when receiving cues from an attractive food patch, followed by a repulsive odor, 2-nonanone. Healthy wildtype worms with normal acetylcholine signaling decide to initiate a food-leaving behavior. We found that mutant worms can receive the same sensory input, 2-nonanone, to trigger a leaving response despite lacking significant amounts of acetylcholine (encoded by cha-1), which is required for fundamental movement and coordinated locomotion. This suggests that an escape response is sensory input dependent and drives decision-making despite having severely defective motor outputs. This study demonstrates a potential avenue to investigate sensory circuits by manipulating odors or other stimuli to trigger a bypass pathway independent of acetylcholine signals to restore behavior. We will continue this investigation by manipulating the escape response pathway by removing and activating various neurotransmitters that may regulate this behavior.
Details
Session 1
11:15am – 12:30pm
Del Norte Hall
Room D: 1530
HSI-SMART
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