{"id":128423,"date":"2021-10-02T04:23:01","date_gmt":"2021-10-02T11:23:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/10\/scientists-rewired-the-brain-of-a-mutant-worm-using-parts-from-a-hydra"},"modified":"2021-10-02T04:23:01","modified_gmt":"2021-10-02T11:23:01","slug":"scientists-rewired-the-brain-of-a-mutant-worm-using-parts-from-a-hydra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/10\/scientists-rewired-the-brain-of-a-mutant-worm-using-parts-from-a-hydra","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Rewired The Brain of a Mutant Worm Using Parts From a Hydra"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-rewired-the-brain-of-a-mutant-worm-using-parts-from-a-hydra2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Brains aren\u2019t the easiest of organs to study, what with their delicate wiring and subtle whispering of neurotransmitter messages. Now, this research could be made a little easier, as we\u2019ve learned we can swap some critical chemical systems with the host animal being none the wiser.<\/p>\n<p>In a proof-of-concept study run by a team of US researchers, the microscopic worm <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Caenorhabditis_elegans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Caenorhabditis elegans<\/em><\/a> was genetically gifted pieces of a nervous system taken from a radically different creature \u2013 a curious freshwater organism known as <em><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hydra_(genus)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Hydra<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The swap wasn\u2019t unlike teaching a specific brain circuit a foreign language, and finding it performs its job just as well as before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Brains aren\u2019t the easiest of organs to study, what with their delicate wiring and subtle whispering of neurotransmitter messages. Now, this research could be made a little easier, as we\u2019ve learned we can swap some critical chemical systems with the host animal being none the wiser. In a proof-of-concept study run by a team of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":556,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19,32,412,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry","category-education","category-genetics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/556"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}