"The finding of an intrinsic structure within the network was certainly surprising," he said. The team didn't expect to observe this level of organization within the seemingly unstructured nerve net, Weissbourd said. This ripple effect coincided with the jellyfish folding up in the corner of its bell, in order to bring the shrimp to its mouth. So for example, if a shrimp was placed at the far edge of the pizza slice, onto its "crust," the crust would light up first, followed by the rest of the slice. 10 amazing things you didn't know about animals The neurons that were closest to the shrimp lit up first, the team found, and then a slew of strobe lights would illuminate the rest of the slice. ![]() This wedge of active neurons was shaped like like a single pizza slice within a circular pie, according to a statement. Rather, only neurons within a well-defined, wedge-shaped region of the bell lit up in response to the shrimpy snack. This activation didn't ripple through the entire jellyfish, like how a stone plopped in a puddle would send ripples across its entire surface. They found that, when the jellyfish latched onto a brine shrimp, or came into contact with a "shrimp extract" made by the team, a group of neurons physically near the shrimp suddenly lit up. With their jellyfish thus transformed into miniature light shows, the team ran a number of experiments to see which neurons lit up during their typical feeding behaviors. So to see their engineered flashing more clearly, the team used CRISPR to snip out a specific gene that makes a different fluorescent protein, one that kept outshining the GCaMP they had inserted, he said. This means that neural activity looks like flashing," Weissbourd told Live Science in an email.īut jellyfish are naturally luminescent. "When neurons are active, the amount of calcium goes up, so GCaMP becomes more fluorescent. ![]() The special glowing protein was inserted into a location in the jellyfish genome so that it only lit up in active neurons, said first author Brandon Weissbourd, a postdoctoral scholar in biology and biological engineering at the California Institute of Technology. hemisphaerica with a genetic modification that coded for a protein called GCaMP, which glows green when it comes into contact with calcium. ![]() To answer this question, the team raised a batch of C.
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