Shrimp FFMN FAC: social media exclusive!

Yesterday, I talked about the shrimp neurons that I think are the most beautiful thing I’ve imaged in science (right). It’s in my new paper in PeerJ.

But PeerJ didn’t get everything I did in this project. Not even for this particular stain that I like so much.

The nerve filled in this image has axons that project both forward and backwards. Most of the neurons’ cell bodies are forward from the fill. This anterior ganglion is more interesting scientifically, because it has the key motor giant neurons with their weird structure. It’s also hard to show all all the neurons’s cell bodies, because several of them are almost right on top of each other.

Consequently, I have a lot of images of the anterior ganglion in the paper; it takes up a bunch of space in Figure 2. I also created a “cheap confocal” movie that combines several images at different depths of field, and that went in as supplementary information.

The posterior ganglion... didn’t get that much love in the paper.

In crayfish, there might be two or three neurons on the left and right sides in that posterior ganglion (4-6 cells total), and these are grouped together in the FAC cluster. In white shrimp, only one cell body on the left and one cell body on the right get stained (2 total). The structure of those shrimp FAC cells is not terribly complicated, either. I didn’t think that scientifically, it was necessary to show the shrimp FAC neurons in the same level of detail in the paper as the other clusters of neurons in the anterior ganglion.

But before I reached that decision, I took a lot of pictures. And I had made another little movie to show the three dimensional structure of the FAC motor neurons within the ganglion.

And here it is!

I did make a few other “drive through the ganglia” movies, but they aren’t quite as nice as the ones I got from this one spectacular stain.

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The most beautiful thing I’ve made in science

Reference

Faulkes Z. 2015. Motor neurons in the escape response circuit of white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus). PeerJ 3: e1112. http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1112