WIKIMEDIA, BOB GOLDSTEINEarly-life exposure to pathogenic bacteria can induce a lifelong imprinted olfactory memory in C. elegans through two distinct neural circuits, according to a study published today (February 11) in Cell. Researchers from Rockefeller University in New York City have shown that early-life pathogen exposure leads the nematode to have a lifelong aversion to the specific associated bacterial odors, whereas later-in-life exposure spurs only transient aversion.
“This study is very exciting,” said Yun Zhang of Harvard who studies learning in C. elegans but was not involved in the present work. “Imprinting is a form of learning widely observed in many animals [but] finding this in C. elegans is very meaningful because this nematode is genetically tractable, and its small nervous system is well described.”
A classic example of imprinting is how geese form attachments to the first moving object they see after birth; Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz famously showed that the “moving object” could be himself instead of a mother goose. During the critical period at the start of life, animals often have unusual abilities to create and maintain long-term memories.
For the present study, Rockefeller’s Xin Jin and colleagues described ...
