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Simultaneously and in parallel, is anyone MRI-scanning hundred of generations a year of nematodes and fruit flies to build basic physical correlations in neurol
by techbio 5y ago
Simultaneously and in parallel, is anyone MRI-scanning hundred of generations a year of nematodes and fruit flies to build basic physical correlations in neurology and genetics? Structurally, much simpler and cheaper, biochemically very similar.
- mattkrause 5y agoThey're much, much too small for MRI[0], but we do know a crazy amount about the structure of C. elegans: there's a complete wiring diagram of all the physical connections between its 302 neurons, a fate map of the embryonic origin and final role of every single cell, and so on. [0] Each voxel (='volume element') in a "standard" MRI is cube 0.5-1mm on a side. A C. elegans is about a millimeter long, but only 100 µm wide, so you could fit about a hundred into one voxel. The resulting scan therefore wouldn't tell you much spatially, though I suppose you could do spectroscopy if you wanted to know what a worm was made of.