Can we understand the dynamics of nervous system of any
animal well enough to be able to control all of its behaviors? What are the key
circuits in the underlying neural networks that we need to control to hijack
the animal’s behaviors? This is a difficult question to answer even in the
nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, which has only 302 neurons interconnected
through 7000 synapses. To find food, the animal uses a combination of reversals
and turns to detect and track attractive signals in its environment. It then
moves up the gradient of these signals in the hope of finding food. We asked if
we could directly control chemotactic behavior in Caenorhabditis elegans by
driving appropriate electrical activity patterns in nervous system.
jounal reference (only the abstract is free): nature>>