Profiling Ciona Behaviour
Establishing links between the anatomy and behavior of animals is one of the top goals of neurobiologists. For such a challenge, Ciona is gradually getting on the right track! Read the exciting new paper from Marios Chatzigeorgiou's group.
Profiling Ciona Behaviour
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The C. intestinalis central nervous system is quite small. With less than 200 neurons the larvae of this species still exhibit relatively complex behaviours. To begin to understand how this system works, Sars Centre scientists have developed a platform to study C. intestinalis behaviour and made an effort to characterize this behaviour quantitatively. With a simple ontology of 11 behavioural modes they could explore the changes in the behavioural repertoire under different conditions.
The study resulted in the paper "Automated behavioural analysis reveals the basic behavioural repertoire of the urochordate Ciona intestinalis" and was carried out by Jerneja Rudolf and Daniel Dondorp, in the Chatzigeorgiou Lab.
