A Receptor Tyrosine Kinase Plays Separate Roles in Sensory Integration and Associative Learning in .

Associative learning and sensory integration are two behavioral processes that involve the sensation and processing of stimuli followed by an altered behavioral response to these stimuli, with learning requiring memory formation and retrieval. We found that the cellular and molecular actions of dissociate sensory integration and associative learning. This was discovered through investigation of a mutation ( ()) affecting both processes.

Neuro-genetic plasticity of Caenorhabditis elegans behavioral thermal tolerance.

Background: Animal responses to thermal stimuli involve intricate contributions of genetics, neurobiology and physiology, with temperature variation providing a pervasive environmental factor for natural selection. Thermal behavior thus exemplifies a dynamic trait that requires non-trivial phenotypic summaries to appropriately capture the trait in response to a changing environment. To characterize the deterministic and plastic components of thermal responses, we developed a novel micro-droplet assay of nematode behavior that permits information-dense summaries of dynamic behavioral phenotypes as reaction norms in response to increasing temperature (thermal tolerance curves, TTC).

Genetically Distinct Behavioral Modules Underlie Natural Variation in Thermal Performance Curves.

Thermal reaction norms pervade organismal traits as stereotyped responses to temperature, a fundamental environmental input into sensory and physiological systems. Locomotory behavior represents an especially plastic read-out of animal response, with its dynamic dependence on environmental stimuli presenting a challenge for analysis and for understanding the genomic architecture of heritable variation. Here we characterize behavioral reaction norms as thermal performance curves for the nematode , using a collection of 23 wild isolate genotypes and 153 recombinant inbred lines to quantify the extent of genetic and plastic variation in locomotory behavior to temperature changes.

Temperature-dependent behaviours are genetically variable in the nematode Caenorhabditis briggsae.

Temperature-dependent behaviours in Caenorhabditis elegans, such as thermotaxis and isothermal tracking, are complex behavioural responses that integrate sensation, foraging and learning, and have driven investigations to discover many essential genetic and neural pathways. The ease of manipulation of the Caenorhabditis model system also has encouraged its application to comparative analyses of phenotypic evolution, particularly contrasts of the classic model C. elegans with C.

Off-resonance and non-resonant dispersion of Kerr nonlinearity for symmetric molecules [Invited].

The exact formula is derived from the "sum over states" (SOS) quantum mechanical model for the frequency dispersion of the nonlinear refractive index coefficient n₂ for centrosymmetric molecules in the off-resonance and non-resonant regimes. This expression is characterized by interference between terms from two-photon transitions from the ground state to the even-symmetry excited states and one-photon transitions between the ground state and odd-symmetry excited states. When contributions from the two-photon terms exceed those from the one-photon terms, the non-resonant intensity-dependent refractive index n₂>0, and vice versa.