Neuroscience
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A wide variety of species are used for the study of visual neuroscience. This is beneficial because fundamental mechanisms and theoretical principles of vision are likely to be highly conserved, while different species exhibit different visual capacities and present different technical advantages for experiments. ⋯ To some this may be surprising, as nocturnal rodents have often been presumed to have poor vision and weak visual behavior. This commentary will provide my personal perspective on how I came to work with rats; discuss an example research project for which rats have been advantageous; and comment on the opportunities and challenges of the preparation.
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An animal's survival strongly depends on a nervous system that can rapidly process and integrate the changing quality of its environment and promote the most appropriate physiological responses. This is amply demonstrated in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, where its sensory system has been shown to impact multiple physiological traits that range from behavior and developmental plasticity to longevity. ⋯ Here we review our current understanding of how the C. elegans sensory system affects diverse physiological traits, whose coordination would be essential for survival under fluctuating environments. The knowledge we derive from the C. elegans studies should provide testable hypotheses in discovering similar mechanisms in higher animals.
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The study of motor control has long concerned itself with the origins of movement variability. Indeed, a common goal of many computational models of motor control is to predict the empirically observed patterns of movement variability. Competing models thus attempt to capture how the brain constrains variability that is detrimental and/or generates variability that might be beneficial. ⋯ Below we describe recent research in which we were able to determine an important source of movement variability using a non-human primate model: the rhesus macaque. The macaque, much like the human, can produce flexible yet highly precise behavior. For this reason, among others, the macaque was an ideal model for the study of movement variability.
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In recent years, the zebrafish has emerged as an appealing model system to tackle questions relating to the neural circuit basis of behavior. This can be attributed not just to the growing use of genetically tractable model organisms, but also in large part to the rapid advances in optical techniques for neuroscience, which are ideally suited for application to the small, transparent brain of the larval fish. ⋯ This approach revealed the broadly distributed network of neurons that were active during the behavior and provided insights into the fine-scale functional architecture in the brain, inter-individual variability, and the spatial distribution of behaviorally relevant signals. Combined with mapping anatomical and functional connectivity, targeted electrophysiological recordings, and genetic labeling of specific populations, this comprehensive approach in zebrafish provides an unparalleled opportunity to study complete circuits in a behaving vertebrate animal.
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Selection of a model organism creates tension between competing constraints. The recent explosion of modern molecular techniques has revolutionized the analysis of neural systems in organisms that are amenable to genetic techniques. Yet, the non-human primate remains the gold-standard for the analysis of the neural basis of behavior, and as a bridge to the operation of the human brain. ⋯ Here, we review experiments and computational studies on a circuit function called "neural integration" that occurs in the brainstems of larval zebrafish, primates, and species "in between". We show that analysis of circuit structure using modern molecular and imaging approaches in zebrafish has remarkable explanatory power for details of the responses of integrator neurons in the monkey. The combination of research from the two species has led to a much stronger hypothesis for the implementation of the neural integrator than could have been achieved using either species alone.