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A central problem of neuroscience involves uncovering the principles governing the organization of nervous systems which ensure robustness in brain development. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans provides us with a model organism for…
Grand efforts in neuroscience are working toward mapping the connectomes of many new species, including the near completion of the Drosophila melanogaster. It is important to ask whether these models could benefit artificial intelligence.…
Dissipative environments are ubiquitous in nature, from microscopic swimmers in low-Reynolds-number fluids to macroscopic animals in frictional media. In this study, motivated by various behaviours of {\it Caenorhabditis elegans} during…
Spatially-embedded complex networks, such as nervous systems, the Internet and transportation networks, generally have non-trivial topological patterns of connections combined with nearly minimal wiring costs. However the growth rules…
Animals adjust their behavioral response to sensory input adaptively depending on past experiences. The flexible brain computation is crucial for survival and is of great interest in neuroscience. The nematode C. elegans modulates its…
Stylized models of the neurodynamics that underpin sensory motor control in animals are proposed and studied. The voluntary motions of animals are typically initiated by high level intentions created in the primary cortex through a…
The brain is one of the most studied and highly complex systems in the biological world. It is the information center behind all vertebrate and most invertebrate life, and thus has become a major focus in current research. While many of…
Understanding the dynamical behavior of complex systems from their underlying network architectures is a long-standing question in complexity theory. Therefore, many metrics have been devised to extract network features like motifs,…
Despite the relative simplicity of C. elegans, its locomotion machinery is not yet well understood. We focus on the generation of dorsoventral body bends. While central pattern generators are commonly involved in animal locomotion, their…
The dynamics of complex systems generally include high-dimensional, non-stationary and non-linear behavior, all of which pose fundamental challenges to quantitative understanding. To address these difficulties we detail a new approach based…
Understanding how information about external stimuli is transformed into behavior is one of the central goals of neuroscience. Here we characterize the information flow through a complete sensorimotor circuit: from stimulus, to sensory…
Cell movement in the early phase of C. elegans development is regulated by a highly complex process in which a set of rules and connections are formulated at distinct scales. Previous efforts have shown that agent-based, multi-scale…
We experimentally studied the locomotion of the nematode C. elegans in both fluidic and granular media. In this fluid dynamics video, we show the motility gaits of the nematode in these two environments. The motility of the nematode C.…
Key features of biological activity can often be captured by transitions between a finite number of semi-stable states that correspond to behaviors or decisions. We present here a broad class of dynamical systems that are ideal for modeling…
Quantitative models of associative learning that explain the behavior of real animals with high precision have turned out very difficult to construct. We do this in the context of the dynamics of the thermal preference of C. elegans. For…
Biological circuits such as neural or gene regulation networks use internal states to map sensory input to an adaptive repertoire of behavior. Characterizing this mapping is a major challenge for systems biology, and though experiments that…
A quantitative understanding of organism-level behavior requires predictive models that can capture the richness of behavioral phenotypes, yet are simple enough to connect with underlying mechanistic processes. Here we investigate the…
One of the biggest challenges in biology is to understand how activity at the cellular level of neurons, as a result of their mutual interactions, leads to the observed behavior of an organism responding to a variety of environmental…
Animals must integrate sensory cues with their current behavioral context to generate a suitable response. How this integration occurs is poorly understood. Previously we developed high throughput methods to probe neural activity in…
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a well-known model organism used to investigate fundamental questions in biology. Motility assays of this small roundworm are designed to study the relationships between genes and behavior. Commonly,…