Analyzing Structural and Symmetrical Properties of C. Elegans Neural Network

The study of neuronscience could be dated back to the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, written in the 17th century BC, which contains the earliest recorded reference to the brain. The hieroglyph for brain, occurring eight times in the papyrus, describes the symptoms, diagnosis, and prognosis of two patients, wounded in the head, who had compound fractures of the skull[1]. In the last two centuries, thanks to the development of biological technologies, researchers can finally probe into real neural networks of various animals, which greatly benefits the study of neuroscience. Understanding the mechanism humans’ brain works on from the aspect of neural network is interesting but challenging due to the complexity of network structure. Hence, scientists have been instead studying behaviors of creatures with a simple neural network. In 1970s, biologist Sydney Brenner and his colleagues began preserving tiny hermaphroditic roundworms known as Caenorhabditis elegans(C. elegans) in agar and osmium fixative, slicing up their bodies like pepperoni and photographing their cells through a powerful electron microscope. Their goal was to create a wiring diagram a map of all 302 neurons in the C. elegans nervous system as well as all the 7,000 connections between those neurons, which is named as connectome today. In 1986 the scientists published a draft of the diagram. More than 20 years later, Dmitri Chklovskii of Janelia Farm Research Campus and his collaborators published a even more comprehensive version.