The peripheral nervous system of the ascidian tadpole larva: Types of neurons and their synaptic networks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Physical and chemical cues from the environment are used to direct animal behavior through a complex network of connections originating in exteroceptors. In chordates, mechanosensory and chemosensory neurons of the peripheral nervous system (PNS) must signal to the motor circuits of the central nervous system (CNS) through a series of pathways that integrate and regulate the output to motor neurons (MN); ultimately these drive contraction of the tail and limb muscles. We used serial-section electron microscopy to reconstruct PNS neurons and their hitherto unknown synaptic networks in the tadpole larva of a sibling chordate, the ascidian, Ciona intestinalis. The larva has groups of neurons in its apical papillae, epidermal neurons in the rostral and apical trunk, caudal neurons in the dorsal and ventral epidermis, and a single tail tip neuron. The connectome reveals that the PNS input arises from scattered groups of these epidermal neurons, 54 in total, and has three main centers of integration in the CNS: in the anterior brain vesicle (which additionally receives input from photoreceptors of the ocellus), the motor ganglion (which contains five pairs of MN), and the tail, all of which in turn are themselves interconnected through important functional relay neurons. Some neurons have long collaterals that form autapses. Our study reveals interconnections with other sensory systems, and the exact inputs to the motor system required to regulate contractions in the tail that underlie larval swimming, or to the CNS to regulate substrate preference prior to the induction of larval settlement and metamorphosis.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".