Simone Rey

The nervous system is an intricate network that perceives, computes and transmits information, allowing animals to immediately sense and react to environmental stimuli. To adequately link sensation to locomotion, the nervous system must be wired in a precise manner.  How this is achieved during development, when the nervous system is still growing, remains a poorly understood topic in neurobiology. I’m addressing this question in the sea slug Berghia stephanieae. In early Berghia juveniles, the nervous system consists of several hundred neurons organized into functional circuits that control the animal’s behavior.  As the animal grows and matures, the number of neurons increases to several thousand while the behavioral repertoire becomes increasingly complex.  This enormous growth occurs over a short period of several weeks, making Berghia an attractive model for neuro-developmental studies. Moreover, their small body size, as compared to zebrafish or mice, is advantageous for serial section volume electron microscopy, an approach that will enable the imaging of the slug brain at synaptic-level resolution.  This model system will allow me to investigate how newly generated neurons are integrated into existing circuits, and how these circuits are organized into mature networks that govern the slug’s increasingly complex behavior.