Caracterización morfológica de circuitos neuronales involucrados en el procesamiento visual en el cangrejo Chasmagnathus granulatus

MERCEDES BENGOCHEA; DANIEL TOMSIC; BERÓN DE ASTRRADA MARTÍN

Huerta Grande, Córdoba

Congreso; Segunda reunión conjunta SAN-TAN. 2010; 2010

Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias

In nature, animals need to sense information of their environment in order to produce an adaptative behaviour. Crabs are highly visual and reactive animals that offer important advantages for studying the physiology of animal behaviour. In spite of this, the anatomy of their nervous system has barely been studied. Crabs have well-developed compound eyes located on movable stalks. Inside the eyestalk, bellow the retina, there is the optic lobe that is composed of three serially arranged retinotopic optic ganglia and a fourth neural structure - called lateral protocerebrum - that results from the fusion of five neuropiles. By applying crystals of fluorescent dextrans directly onto the second retinotopic neuropile we stained the neural projections from this neuropile to the third retinotopic neuropile and to the neural nuclei of the lateral protocerebrum. Based on these stainings we present here a preliminar map of the connectivity of second optic neuropile with downstream ganglia. This morphological study is the anatomical counterpart of ongoing studies on the physiology of vision with calcium imaging techniques