A University professor is making headlines and history with his passion for researching worms – or more specifically, if a device in a worm’s brain interprets tastes and smells to regulate its motor functions.
Biology professor Shawn Lockery, along with several colleagues, has recently discovered a “computer” that exists in the brain of nematodes, a species of parasitic worms, that uses calculus to guide the worms toward food and away from hazards such as poisons.
Though Lockery said his main purpose for conducting the research is for the sake of research itself, the work he and his colleagues are doing will help create drugs to treat a range of problems involving taste and smell, according to a University press release.
The professor’s research on nematodes may also help doctors screen anti-nematode drugs more effectively. The World Health Organization estimates that roughly 30 percent of the world population is currently affected by parasitic worms.
Lockery said he and his colleagues hope to pair with pharmaceutical companies some time in the next few years to screen these and other drugs. This work will be done in the new Lori Lokey Laboratories.
Lockery, whose latest research findings have been published in a paper that appeared in the journal Nature, said he conducted the experiments to determine if sensory detectors in the worm’s brain actually regulate the worm’s behavior when searching for food.
Through experiments, Lockery found that the worms posses “a tiny, specialized computer inside (the) primitive round worm. This computer does some nice calculus, differentiating the rate of change of the strength of various tastes.”
“The worm uses this information to find food and to avoid poisons,” Lockery said in a press release.
“There are strong indications that a similar device exists in the human nervous system,” he said.
Lockery’s previous research showed that nematodes changed direction based on tastes and smells introduced into their environment, leading him to predict that a “derivative crunching” mechanism existed in the nematode’s brain that controlled the motion of the worm.
“We knew from behavioral experiments that nematodes were doing the same thing that humans were doing, but only from the view of behavioral responses. We didn’t know what was going on in the brain.”
Lockery will be continuing his work with nematodes over the next few years.
He recently received a Guggenheim Award for roughly $40,000 for his work with nematodes, which he will use to go on sabbatical for a year doing worm-related studying.
In May, Lockery told the Emerald he will spend the 2008-09 year at a Harvard University laboratory mastering microfluidics – which deals with the movement of fluids through very small devices using tubing that is usually only a few thousandths of an inch across – so that he will be able to design and build environments for nematodes to explore.
This will enable him to both control what the worms are exposed to and better monitor and record their behavior and neurological activity.
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