Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

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Animal behavior is generated by neural activity as well as sensory feedback and the biomechanical constraints of the body in an environment. Locomotion of C. elegans is an ideal model to study these neuromechanical interactions, due to its well-described connectome and limited behavioral repertoire, which includes forward crawling or swimming via undulation. The motor circuit responsible for forward locomotion in C. elegans is well-determined, but how the neurons in the circuit coordinate with each other to produce robust locomotion in widely different environments is less understood. One hypothesis is that the worm undulates on command from a central pattern generator that drives the waves down the length of the body through environmental and neural feedbacks; another is that the waves emerge from locally-organized oscillations that coordinate body-wide via feedback. To investigate the latter hypothesis, we analyze a model of a single neuromechanical oscillator to gain insight into the fundamental oscillation mechanism, and discuss future work to investigate the emergence of coordinated undulation waveforms via a system of coupled oscillators.

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