A Hybrid Electrical/Chemical Circuit in the Spinal Cord Generates a Transient Embryonic Motor Behavior
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spontaneous network activity is a highly stereotyped early feature of developing circuits throughout the nervous system, including in the spinal cord. Spinal locomotor circuits produce a series of behaviors during development before locomotion that reflect the continual integration of spinal neurons into a functional network, but how the circuitry is reconfigured is not understood. The first behavior of the zebrafish embryo (spontaneous coiling) is mediated by an electrical circuit that subsequently generates mature locomotion (swimming) as chemical neurotransmission develops. We describe here a new spontaneous behavior, double coiling, that consists of two alternating contractions of the tail in rapid succession. Double coiling was glutamate-dependent and required descending hindbrain excitation, similar to but preceding swimming, making it a discrete intermediary developmental behavior. At the cellular level, motoneurons had a distinctive glutamate-dependent activity pattern that correlated with double coiling. Two glutamatergic interneurons, CoPAs and CiDs, had different activity profiles during this novel behavior. CoPA neurons failed to show changes in activity patterns during the period in which double coiling appears, whereas CiD neurons developed a glutamate-dependent activity pattern that correlated with double coiling and they innervated motoneurons at that time. Additionally, double coils were modified after pharmacological reduction of glycinergic neurotransmission such that embryos produced three or more rapidly alternating coils. We propose that double coiling behavior represents an important transition of the motor network from an electrically coupled spinal cord circuit that produces simple periodic coils to a spinal network driven by descending chemical neurotransmission, which generates more complex behaviors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".