A team of scientists has definitely given a new meaning to the term "glow worm." Researchers at Princeton have released a video of the neural activity found in the brains of nematode worms — all to a dazzling effect.

The video itself comes from a study the scientists conducted to chart the brain activity of moving animals (in this case, worms) to better understand how neural hustle and bustle works in larger creatures, like humans. To do this, the research team designed a fluorescent protein that would strongly react (i.e., light up) when introduced to calcium, the latter of which is an indicator of neurons fluttering about.

"Large-scale neural recordings in freely moving animals are important for understanding how patterns of activity across a population of neurons generates animal behavior," details a paper co-authored by Princeton researchers Jeffrey P. Nguyen and Frederick B. Shipley on their findings published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which discusses the importance of visualization as to where the brain activity occurs, and what exactly it prompts — especially in the case of the glowing worms, which used a surprising number of neurons to move in one direction or another.

"Neurons are found whose activity correlates with behaviors including forward and backward locomotion and turning," explained Shipley and Nguyen. "A growing body of evidence suggests that animal behavior is sometimes generated by the collective activity of many neurons."

To track these neurons, the researchers used a special microscope and accompanying software that tracked the worms' brain activity on a second-to-second basis, recording the fluorescent effects of the introduced protein with multiple close-up cameras.

"This system is exciting because it provides the most detailed picture yet of brain-wide neural activity with single-neuron resolution in the brain of an animal that is free to move around," said Andrew Leifer, an associate research scholar at Princeton's Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics who also worked on the project, in a statement released by the university.

"By studying how the brain works in a simple animal like the worm ... we hope to gain insights into how collections of neurons work that are universal for all brains, even humans," he concluded.

Check out worm brain activity in (luminous) action in the video clip below.

  

Via: Engadget