Roundworm's brain

"In an laboratory overlooking New York's East River, Dr. Cornelia Bargmann watches two colleagues manipulate a microscopic roundworm. They have trapped it in a tiny groove on a clear plastic chip, with just its nose sticking into the channel. Pheromones-signaling chemicals produced by other worms- are being pumped through the channel, and the researchers have genetically engineered two neurons in the worm's head to glow bright green if a neuron responds. These ingenious techniques for exploring a tiny animal's behavior are the fruit of many years' work by Dr. Bargman's and other labs. Despite the roundworm's lowlines on the scale of intellectual achievement, the study of its nervous system offers one of the most promising approaches for understanding the human brain, since it uses much the same working parts but is around a million times less complex. Caenorhabditis elegans, as the roundworm is properly know, is a tiny, ransparent animal just a millimeter long. In the nature, it feed on the bacteria that thrive in rottng plants and animals. It is a favorite laboratory organism for several reasons, including the comparative simplicity of its brain, which has just 302 neurons and 8 synapses, or neuronto-neurons connections. Theses connections are pretty much he same from one individual to another, meaning that in all worms the brain is wired up in essentially same way. Such a system should be considerably easier to understand han the human brain, a structure with close to 100 million neurons, 100 miles of biological wiring and 100 trillion synapses ...

The first thing she had to do was learn the worm's neuroanatomy, and she did so in a way only one other person has ever done." Nicolas Wade, "From lowly roundworm clues to human brain", in International Herald Tribune, Wednesday, june 22, 2011.