Pan-neuronal screening in Caenorhabditis elegans reveals asymmetric dynamics of AWC neurons is critical for thermal avoidance behavior
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding neural functions inevitably involves arguments traversing multiple levels of hierarchy in biological systems. However, finding new components or mechanisms of such systems is extremely time-consuming due to the low efficiency of currently available functional screening techniques. To overcome such obstacles, we utilize pan-neuronal calcium imaging to broadly screen the activity of the C. elegans nervous system in response to thermal stimuli. A single pass of the screening procedure can identify much of the previously reported thermosensory circuitry as well as identify several unreported thermosensory neurons. Among the newly discovered neural functions, we investigated in detail the role of the AWCOFF neuron in thermal nociception. Combining functional calcium imaging and behavioral assays, we show that AWCOFF is essential for avoidance behavior following noxious heat stimulation by modifying the forward-to-reversal behavioral transition rate. We also show that the AWCOFF signals adapt to repeated noxious thermal stimuli and quantify the corresponding behavioral adaptation.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 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".