The Non-Model Organism “Renaissance” has Arrived | The Transmitter

Note: Among the MBL-affiliated scientists profiled in this story are Whitman Scientists (and former Grass Fellows) Duncan Leitch and Z Yan Wang, Elly Tanaka (Embryology course alumna), and Anne Brunet, former faculty, Biology of Aging course.

Meet 10 neuroscientists bringing model diversity back with the funky animals they study.

Neuroscience can sometimes feel like an old mouse club—but it wasn’t always that way. In the 1960s and ’70s, neuroscientists routinely put on their field boots to search for the “animal that was expert at doing the task that you were interested in studying,” says Eve Marder, university professor of biology at Brandeis University. “People studied insects and annelids and mollusks and every kind of animal imaginable. And if they could have studied elephants, they would have.”

Many fundamental—and Nobel-prize-winning—discoveries emerged from this approach. Recording from the squid’s giant axon, for example, revealed how action potentials work; experiments in sea slugs illuminated the molecular changes that drive learning and memory; work in barn owls unraveled sound localization; and studies in horseshoe crabs first exposed lateral inhibition in photoreceptors.

But by the end of the 20th century, model diversity had fallen out of vogue. A small band of neuroethologists continued to explore animals off the beaten path, but the majority of neuroscientists soon jumped over to standard animal models, Marder says. Read rest of the story here.

Source: The Non-model Organism “Renaissance” has Arrived | The Transmitter