Ethanol alters mechanosensory habituation in C. elegans by way of the BK potassium channel through a novel mechanism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this research, we investigated how alcohol modulates the simplest form of learning, habituation, in Caenorhabditis elegans. We used our high throughput Multi-Worm Tracker to conduct a large scale study of more than 21,000 wild-type worms to assess the effects of different concentrations of alcohol on habituation of the well-characterized tap withdrawal response. We found that the effect of alcohol on habituation of this reversal response to a repeated mechanosensory stimulus (taps) differed depending on the component of the reversal response assessed. Interestingly, when we examined habituation of response probability on and off alcohol we discovered that alcohol switched the predominant response to tap from a backward reversal to a brief forward movement. Because the large conductance potassium (BK) channel has been shown to be important for the effect of alcohol on behaviour in a variety of organisms, including C. elegans, we investigated whether the C. elegans BK channel ortholog, SLO-1, mediated the effects of alcohol on habituation. We tested several different strains of worms with mutations in slo-1 along with wild-type controls; null mutations in slo-1 made animals resistant to alcohol induced changes in habituation. However, a mutation in the putative ethanol binding site on SLO-1 did not disrupt the impact of ethanol on habituation. Finally, by degrading SLO-1 in different parts of the nervous system we found that the function of SLO-1 in ethanol's impact on habituation is likely distributed throughout the neural circuit that responds to tap. Based on these results, our main conclusions are 1) ethanol is not a general facilitator or inhibitor of habituation but rather a complex modulator, 2) SLO-1 is critical for the effect of ethanol on habituation, 3) ethanol is interacting (directly or indirectly) with SLO-1 through a novel unidentified mechanism to influence how animals respond to repeated taps.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".