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  CommunicationNewsNeuroscience, responses of neurones to colored stimuli have been observed in zebrafish

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Neuroscience, responses of neurones to colored stimuli have been observed in zebrafish

Published in BMC Biology the research by the Department of Biology and LENS

Let's imagine that we can observe an entire nervous system in action and see directly how each individual neuron activates and responds to a stimulus.

Thanks to the experiment conducted by researchers from the Departments of Biology and the European Laboratory of Nonlinear Spectroscopy (LENS), coordinated by Francesco Vanzi, this observation was possible and allowed to reconstruct the reactions of an organism, zebrafish, and the circuits involved in the responses elicited by a visual stimulus. This is explained by the article published in the journal BMC Biolog. (“Colored visual stimuli evoke spectrally-tuned neuronal responses across the central nervous system of zebrafish larvae”).

“Zebrafish has a simple central nervous system consisting of only 100,000 neurons, but at the same time it is capable of very complex behaviours, many of which are based on visual inputs" Vanzi explains. It also has another peculiarity: in the larval stage it is completely transparent and this has allowed us to study the responses of its neurons,” the researcher continues.

To do this, researchers have used larvae expressing in all their neurons a genetically encoded calcium indicator that emits a fluorescence signal, which can be visualized by two-photon microscopy. “We imparted stimuli at wavelengths corresponding to four different colors and measured the activity of the entire central nervous system,” explains Chiara Fornetto, the PhD student of LENS who developed the experiment. "And we observed, for the first time, the response of each of the 100,000 neurons and the distribution of the cells involved in the processing of chromatic information by the organism.”

“Our observations, developed in collaboration with Francesco Pavone from LENS show that the colored visual stimuli give rise to a nervous reaction that is distributed well beyond the visual regions of the brain of the animal and reaches also the spinal cord." comments Vanzi. “A discovery that opens the way for an understanding of the circuits responsible for certain behavioural responses dependent on the distribution of wavelengths in the natural environment.”

“Zebrafish is currently the only vertebrate model in which a complete analysis of the activity in the brain during the reception of external stimuli, the elaboration and production of a neuronal and behavioural response is possible and, therefore, it represents a unique tool in neuroscience to face the great challenge of understanding how the nervous system performs its amazing functions and also how certain pathologies compromise some of these,” the researcher concludes.

Publication
date
04 December 2020
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