What can a worm learn in a bacteria-rich habitat?

Abstract

With a nervous system that has only a few hundred neurons, Caenorhabditis elegans was initially not regarded as a model for studies on learning. However, the collective effort of the C. elegans field in the past several decades has shown that the worm displays plasticity in its behavioral response to a wide range of sensory cues in the environment. As a bacteria-feeding worm, C. elegans is highly adaptive to the bacteria enriched in its habitat, especially those that are pathogenic and pose a threat to survival. It uses several common forms of behavioral plasticity that last for different amounts of time, including imprinting and adult-stage associative learning, to modulate its interactions with pathogenic bacteria. Probing the molecular, cellular and circuit mechanisms underlying these forms of experience-dependent plasticity has identified signaling pathways and regulatory insights that are conserved in more complex animals.