In a study published in Current Biology, a team of engineers and neuroscientists have collaborated to create 3D videos of individual nerve cells functioning inside fruit fly larvae as they move. These videos have brought insight into how proprioceptive neurons—a type of nerve cells.
"We know that the brain receives sensory signals though electrical pulses passed along neurons, but we didn't understand why some kinds of neurons are located in specific positions, or how particular signaling patterns represented different movements," said Wesley Grueber, PhD, a principal investigator at Columbia's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and the paper's co-senior author. "To understand this process, we needed to know what signals the neurons are sending while the larva crawled around unconstrained."
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