Synchronization properties in <i>C. elegans</i>: Relating behavioral circuits to structural and functional neuronal connectivity

The useful part

by Gourab Kumar Sar, Andrew Patton, Emma Towlson, Jörn Davidsen A central question in neuroscience is how neural processing generates or encodes behavior. Caenorhabditis elegans is well suited to addressing this question, given its compact nervous system and near-complete structural connectome. While some have shown that the connectome can robustly encode specific behaviors such as locomotion, others report that functional connectivity can be reconfigured across behaviors.

How it works

• comparison with behavioral circuits shows that locomotion circuits are largely segregated into distinct functional communities while other circuits are more distributed across multiple functional communities.
• We aim to understand the relationship between structural connectivity, functional connectivity and biological behavior in silico by using an experimentally motivated computational model leveraging the...
• Stimulation of specific neurons in the model induces oscillatory neural responses, enabling us to infer neuronal functional connectivity.
• Functional connectivity is found to be stronger among some neurons, allowing us to identify functional communities.
• We find that electrical synapses play a critical role in determining functional communities, and the resulting mesoscale functional architecture is predominantly gap junctionally assortative.

What to take from it

We also observe that stimulation of neurons belonging to these distributed circuits elicits a more synchronized neuronal response compared to stimulation of neurons within the more segregated circuits.

Details worth keeping

This is consistent with the presence of behavioral patterns that originate in one circuit and terminate in another (e.g., chemosensation leading to locomotion), such that stimulation of one circuit can activate the other and eventually result in a synchronized response. We also find a large repertoire of chimera-like synchronization patte...