Modeling complex behavior with a simple organism
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The roundworm C. elegans is a simple animal whose nervous system has exactly 302 neurons. Each of the connections between those neurons has been comprehensively mapped, allowing researchers to study how they work together to generate the animal’s different behaviors.
Steven Flavell, an MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and investigator with the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, uses the worm as a model to study motivated behaviors such as feeding and navigation, in hopes of shedding light on the fundamental mechanisms that may also determine how similar behaviors are controlled in other animals.
