SAN FRANCISCO, CA, DEC. 13, 2005-- Survival is an acquired taste. The worm, C. elegans, lives in soil and feeds on different bacteria, including potentially pathogenic ones. But good taste is not innate in worms. This makes olfactory learning a required subject for C. elegans, a creature with 302 neurons and a nervous system so simple that it is possible to map the individual neurons responsible for specific behaviors. Many of the genes that drive the nervous system of C. elegans have human homologs. Therefore, by studying the education of young worm gourmets, researcher Yun Zhang developed a model system for learning that may extend to humans in places like the Rockefeller University where Zhang is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Cori Bargmann.

At the ASCB meeting in San Francisco, Zhang will discuss her "worm school" experiments just published in "Nature" (10 November 2005: Vol. 438:179-184) with journalists at the "TEN AM Press Briefing" on Tuesday (Dec. 13) in Room 212 of the Moscone before her talk later in the day to the "Building Sensory Networks" Minisymposium.

"Worms learn from their mistakes," says Zhang. Some pathogenic strains of common soil bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Serratia marcescens can proliferate in the worm gut. Overindulgence in these pathogens can be fatal. Zhang set up a worm school for olfactory learning, raising one group of worms on a diet of E. coli OP50, a standard lab worm food, and a second group on pathogens, either S. marcescens or P. aeruginosa, supplemented with some OP50. For a final exam, the researcher offered her worms a choice between OP50 and the pathogens. Adult worms raised on the toxic diet took one sniff of the pathogens and headed for OP50. Those raised on OP50 didn't know the difference. They dug in without preference.

"This experience-based olfactory change is distinct from adaptation and appears to represent a form of associative learning, similar to taste aversion," says
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Contact: John Fleischman
jfleischman@ascb.org
513-929-4635
American Society for Cell Biology
14-Dec-2005

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