Brenner, without skipping a beat, stated this served his purposes just fine: to study variability in synaptic connectivity among otherwise isogenic animals – and found lots, enough to state that genetic determinism w.r.t. neural circuit configuration as understood at the time was largely hogwash.
These results were reproduced 35 years later by Witvliet et al. 2021:
"The wiring diagram is not stereotyped"
"Each worm has connections that are not found in other individuals.
About 43% of all cell–cell connections—accounting for 16% of all chemical synapses—are not conserved between isogenic individuals. By contrast, physical contacts between neurites at birth are maintained across developmental stages. Wiring variability contrasts with the assumption that the C. elegans connectome is hardwired."
Cool stuff: "Two studies show how messages can pass between cells over longer distances, through a ‘wireless’ nerve network in the worm Caenorhabditis elegans." https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03619-w
Our signal propagation atlas of C. elegans is now out in Nature
! We measure the network’s response to optogenetic stimulation of each neuron in the head, one at a time-- over 23,000 neuron pairs. Congrats to Francesco Randi, Anuj Sharma, & Sophie Dvali! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06683-4
Interestingly, that's what Rex Kerr @ichoran did for #Celegans at #HHMIJanelia: keep strains frozen to be able to compare behavioral responses to the same stimuli across generations.
... in which the authors discuss why and how to tackle the brain of the nematode #Celegans.
The engineers throwing down the gauntlet!
@kordinglab I'd start by splitting all neurons into axon and dendrite ... its fairly obvious from the anatomy as recorded at the WormBase, and would let you simplify the activation function of each neuron.
Open science project OpenWorm simulates the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans at the cellular level.
A deep, principled understanding of the biology of this organism remains elusive.
The long-term goal is to model all 959 cells of C. elegans. This bottom up simulation is pursued by the OpenWorm community.
There are useful bots like, for me, @flypapers – I wish I could filter for neuro-only papers, but the volume isn't high. Then there're neuroscience-specific servers like synapse.cafe and neuromatch.social – their local timelines may reveal further accounts you may like.