| Abstract No.: | A-D1131 |
| Country: | Canada |
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| Title: | CHEMOSENSORY CONTEXT CONDITIONING IN CAENORHABDITIS ELEGANS. |
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| Authors/Affiliations: | 1 Lee Lau*; 1 Catharine Rankin;
1 University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
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| Content: | Habituation has traditionally been considered a nonassociative form of learning. However, recent research suggests that retention of this nonassociative form of learning may be aided by associations formed during training. An example of this is context conditioning, in which animals that are trained and tested in the presence of a contextual cue show greater retention of a memory compared to animals trained and tested in different environments. This study reports context conditioning in habituation in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The results showed that retention of habituation to tap stimuli were stronger if training and testing occurred in the presence of the same chemosensory cue. This was true for both taste (soluble sodium acetate) and smell (volatile diacetyl). We are currently investigating the neural circuits underlying this form of learning. To do this, we are testing context conditioning in strains of worms with mutations in specific chemosensory neurons (e.g. odr-1 and tax-4). Since the taste and olfactory neural circuits have been mapped, chemosensory context conditioning will serve as a vehicle to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of associative learning and other forms of memory. |
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