A cellular and regulatory map of the cholinergic nervous system of C.elegans
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Columbia University, United States
- Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
- Albert Einstein College of Medicine, United States
- MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, United Kingdom
- Texas A&M University, United States
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Texas A&M University, United States
Abstract
Nervous system maps are of critical importance for understanding how nervous systemsdevelop and function. We systematically map here all cholinergic neuron types in the male and hermaphrodite C.elegans nervous system. We find that acetylcholine is the most broadly used neurotransmitter and we analyze its usage relative to other neurotransmitters within the context of the entire connectome and within specific network motifs embedded in the connectome. We reveal several dynamic aspects of cholinergic neurotransmitter identity, including a sexually dimorphic glutamatergic to cholinergic neurotransmitter switch in a sex-shared interneuron. An expression pattern analysis of ACh-gated anion channels furthermore suggests that ACh may also operate very broadly as an inhibitory neurotransmitter. As a first application of this comprehensive neurotransmitter map, we identify transcriptional control mechanisms that control cholinergic neurotransmitter identity and cholinergic circuit assembly.
Article and author information
Author details
Reviewing Editor
- Kang Shen, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University, United States
Version history
- Received: October 20, 2015
- Accepted: December 22, 2015
- Accepted Manuscript published: December 25, 2015 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: February 18, 2016 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2015, Pereira et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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A cellular and regulatory map of the cholinergic nervous system of C.elegans
eLife 4:e12432.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.12432
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