Levich Institute and Physics Department, City College of New York, New York, NY, 10031, USA.
Nat Commun. 2019 Oct 31;10(1):4961. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-12675-8.
The neural connectome of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been completely mapped, yet in spite of being one of the smallest connectomes (302 neurons), the design principles that explain how the connectome structure determines its function remain unknown. Here, we find symmetries in the locomotion neural circuit of C. elegans, each characterized by its own symmetry group which can be factorized into the direct product of normal subgroups. The action of these normal subgroups partitions the connectome into sectors of neurons that match broad functional categories. Furthermore, symmetry principles predict the existence of novel finer structures inside these normal subgroups forming feedforward and recurrent networks made of blocks of imprimitivity. These blocks constitute structures made of circulant matrices nested in a hierarchy of block-circulant matrices, whose functionality is understood in terms of neural processing filters responsible for fast processing of information.
秀丽隐杆线虫的神经连接组已经被完全绘制出来，但尽管它是最小的连接组之一（有 302 个神经元），但仍不清楚是什么设计原则解释了连接组结构如何决定其功能。在这里，我们发现秀丽隐杆线虫运动神经回路中的对称性，每个对称性都有自己的对称群，可以分解为正规子群的直积。这些正规子群的作用将连接组划分为与广泛功能类别匹配的神经元扇区。此外，对称原理预测了这些正规子群内部存在新的更精细结构，形成由原像块组成的前馈和递归网络。这些块构成了由循环矩阵嵌套在块循环矩阵层次结构中的矩阵组成的结构，其功能可以理解为负责快速处理信息的神经处理滤波器。
