NO! This is not going to be a piece about the usual fixed points in a human being's trajectory mentioned in the title. Instead this is going to be about C. elegans (CE from now on) and it's possible connection to those.
Today we had a speaker Greg Stephens from Princeton over at our department who works in Bio-Physics to talk about his work on identifying basic components of motion for CE (He categorically refused to pronounce the 'C' in CE BTW!).His abstract had the very attractive "Eigenworm" (!) word to describe the 4 basic real space shapes that apparently account for most of the observed configurations of CE when photographed while executing motion on a 2D agar plate.(He went on to describe a lot of other work of which I understood only a little , but that does not take away anything from the remainder of this post.)
I have always found talks that encompass two different branches of research turn out to be interesting battlegrounds for the respective practitioners. Also because these talks are generally delivered at a lower technical level than to normal professionals of the art the audience often finds avenues for intellectual mischief.It probably is also a very humbling experience for everyone concerned. Something akin to the realization that there are other religions out there with followers equally fervent?
The speaker gave a very well prepared talk , speaking as he was as part of the interview I believe for one of the faculty positions in biophysics in our department. As part of the introduction we came to know that the CE was a multicellular organ of ~1000 cells of which 302 are neurons giving it a brain about a third of it's body and making it brainier than us!The basic experiment involves photographing the free wriggly motion of CE on an agar surface while confined to a certain region by a copper annulus of R=51 mms , copper being used since copper repels CE and so it keeps to only the insides of the region.It's motion in this region is videographed using high frequency video and then the frames analysed for the geometric shape of the creature.
As part of modifications of this basic setup sometimes a laser light is used to provide "Pain" to the creature and then the effect seen on the subsequent motion.This was the point latched onto by a very meticulous Prof. Gerd Bergmann who very benignly asked "Is it true that to sense pain a minimum number of neurons are required, is 302 above that mark?for eg. some insects don't feel pain!!!!" At which point the speaker changed the label of the stimulus to "Acute Thermal stimulus " adding further that he was not sure whether the stimulus was pain enough for the creature or not but the proceedings sure were for him.
More than an hour into the talk ,a very pertinent question arose which is quite fundamental actually ? -left to itself ,devoid of any stimuli why did the CE move? This point being brought up by someone at my back all I could hear in the darkened room was something like:
"So do you sprinke food in the inside region"
"NO."
"So No food.!"
"No, No Food"
"Ah, No food."
at which point a professor right in front of me quipped "Just Like this seminar" !!!
The asker continued :
"So why do they move?"
"I don't exactly know or want to hypothesize, but may be to mate"
"Do you use only males or hermaphrodites too!"
"If they want to mate, they must be males"
And so this was another instance of an interesting cross disciplinary talk.
Quite Interesting, Indeed!!!
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