Michael- ah yes, that makes a lot of sense. Of course if the worm’s only got 213 neurons, it’s not going to have hundreds of neurotransmitters. That being said, it might have quite a few different receptor sub-types and synaptic modification mechanisms. Even so… It would seem theoretically feasible to me for someone to hook up electrodes to each neuron at a time and catalog not only the location and connections of each neuron, but also what the output of each synapse is and what the resulting PSPs are during normal C. elegans behaviors… Now that’s something I should tell Brenner about, given his penchant for megalomaniacal information gathering projects (he did the C. Elegans genome, a catalog of each cell in its body throughout its embryonic development, and its neural connections).
Michael- ah yes, that makes a lot of sense. Of course if the worm’s only got 213 neurons, it’s not going to have hundreds of neurotransmitters. That being said, it might have quite a few different receptor sub-types and synaptic modification mechanisms. Even so… It would seem theoretically feasible to me for someone to hook up electrodes to each neuron at a time and catalog not only the location and connections of each neuron, but also what the output of each synapse is and what the resulting PSPs are during normal C. elegans behaviors… Now that’s something I should tell Brenner about, given his penchant for megalomaniacal information gathering projects (he did the C. Elegans genome, a catalog of each cell in its body throughout its embryonic development, and its neural connections).