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C. elegans Positive Butanone Learning, Short-term, and Long-term Associative Memory Assays
Published on: March 11, 2011
But can they learn? My accidental discovery of learning and memory in C. elegans
1Department of Psychology and Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Abstract:
I did not set out to study C. elegans. My undergraduate and graduate training was in Psychology. My postdoctoral work involved studying learning and memory in 1 mm diameter juvenile Aplysia californica. As a starting Assistant Professor when I attempted to continue my studies on Aplysia I encountered barriers to carrying out that work; at about the same time I was introduced to Caenorhabditis elegans and decided to investigate whether they could learn and remember. My laboratory was the first to demonstrate conclusively that C. elegans could learn and in the years since then my lab and many others have demonstrated that C. elegans is capable of a variety of forms of learning and memory.
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