Definition
In response to a light touch, the medicinal leech bends away from the touched site, a behavior called the local bend. Using a three-layer neuronal network comprising mechanosensory neurons, interneurons, and motor neurons, the leech encodes touch location and coordinates muscle contraction to produce the appropriately directed bend.
Detailed Description
Background
Our understanding of neural coding has benefited significantly from the study of well-defined behaviors produced by relatively small nervous systems. In terms of neural underpinnings, more of such behaviors are understood in the medicinal leech than in any other system (Kristan et al. 2005). This is due, in part, to the leech’s segmented nervous system, which comprises 21 ganglia connected in series to form a nerve cord, with head and tail ganglia at either end. The leech produces “whole-body” behaviors (such as swimming and crawling) that involve coordination between neurons in all ganglia, as well as “local”...
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References
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Lewis, J.E. (2014). Leech Local Bend: Neural Coding of Touch Location. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_342-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_342-2
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Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-7320-6
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Latest
Leech Local Bend: Neural Coding of Touch Location- Published:
- 28 July 2014
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_342-2
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Original
Leech Local Bend: Neural Coding of Touch Location- Published:
- 12 April 2014
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_342-1