Neuroglia in C. elegans

The nematode C. elegans is one of the most important model organisms for understanding neurobiology. Its completely mapped neural connectome of 302 neurons and fully characterized and stereotyped development have made it a prototype for understanding nervous system structure, development, and function. Fifty-six out of C. elegans' total of 959 somatic cells are classified as neuroglia. Although research on worm glia has lagged behind studies focused on neurons, there has been a steep upswing in interest during the past decade. Information arising from the recent burst of research on worm glia supports the idea that C. elegans will continue to be an important animal model for understanding glial cell biology. Since the developmental lineage of all cells was mapped, each glial cell in C. elegans is known by a specific name and has research associated with it. We list and describe the glia of the hermaphrodite form of C. elegans and summarize research findings relating to each glial cell. We hope this lecture provides an informative overview of worm glia to accompany the excellent and freely available online resources available to the worm research community.

Navin Pokala, PhD, is an assistant professor of Biology in the Department of Life Sciences at the New York Institute of Technology. He performed his doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, earning a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. His thesis research was on computational protein design. He moved to The Rockefeller University for his postdoctoral research, where he developed chemical-genetic methods for perturbing C. elegans neural activity, and computational methods for automatically tracking their behaviors. His current research is focused on using C. elegans as a testing ground for the development of experimental and computational strategies for network neuroscience.

Professor Alexei Verkhratsky, MD, PhD, D.Sc., Member of Academia Europaea, Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Member of Real Academia Nacional de Farmacia (Spain), was born in 1961 in Stanislaw, Galicia, Western Ukraine. He graduated from Kiev Medical Institute in 1983, and received his PhD (1986) and D.Sc. (1993) in Physiology from Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology, Kiev, Ukraine. He joined the Division of Neuroscience, School of Biological Sciences in Manchester in September 1999, became a Professor of Neurophysiology in 2002, and served as Head of the Division from 2002 to 2004. From 2007 to 2010 he was appointed as visiting professor/Head of Department of Cellular and Molecular Neurophysiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine, Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic. In 2010 A. Verkhratsky was appointed as a Research Professor of Ikerbasque (the Basque Research Council), in 2011 as an Honorary Visiting Professor at Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan and since 2012 has acted as Adjunct Scientific Director of the Achucarro Basque Centre for Neuroscience (Bilbao, Spain). Prof. A. Verkhratsky is a co-editor-in-chief of Cell Calcium (2000), and Membrane Transport & Signalling - Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (2009), Receiving Editor of Cell Death & Disease (2009), and a member of editorial boards of numerous scientific journals.

Prof. Alexei Verkhratsky is an internationally recognised scholar in the field of cellular neurophysiology. His research is concentrated on the mechanisms of inter- and intracellular signalling in the CNS, being especially focused on two main types of neural cells, neurones and neuroglia. He made important contributions to understanding the chemical and electrical transmission in reciprocal neuronal-glial communications and on the role of intracellular Ca2+ signals in the integrative processes in the nervous system. Many of A. Verkhratsky's studies are dedicated to investigations of cellular mechanisms of neurodegeneration. In recent years he studies the glial pathology in Alzheimer disease. He authored a pioneering hypothesis of astroglial atrophy as a mechanism of neurodegeneration.