Paul Katz in the Biology Department at UMass Amherst was recently awarded a 4-year grant from the Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) program at NIH to create map of every neuron in a sea slug’s brain using high-throughput automated techniques. The project, titled “Automated neural identification - individuals, development, and species” is an international collaboration with Daniel Baum’s group at the Zuse Institute in Berlin. Importantly, the project will use machine-learning techniques to trace individual neurons through developmental time.
A sea slug brain, unlike our brain, but like the octopus brain, continues to add neurons as the animal grows at an incredible rate. In eight weeks, the cerebral ganglion increases its number of neurons ten-fold! Moreover, in sea slugs, many neurons have individual identities, allowing the same cell to be found in different animals. This project will attempt to determine if this individual addressing is true of every neuron by examining gene expression for all neurons in the brain. This is only feasible because the sea slug, a nudibranch call Berghia stephanieae, has only about 10,000 as an early adult. This project dovetails with collaborative work between the Katz lab and Jeff Lichtman’s lab at Harvard to create a complete connectomic map of Berghia’s brain, detailing all of the synaptic connections using volumetric electron microscopy. This work will further enable the use of Berghia as an accessible laboratory animal for neuroscience research. It is being adopted for teaching labs at UMass and two other universities. Because the animals are easy to raise, hundreds can be grown at low cost and require little space.