From: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112731816
For more than fifty years scientists have been using neurons from squid to study how messages are sent and received in the human brain. Squid neurons are used because they accurately resemble the human neuron except for the fact that the axons are much bigger and therefore easier to study. So big in fact that they have been nicknamed “giant neurons” and can be seen with the naked eye.
Just recently German researcher Henrik Alle has questioned this practice because of the enormous amount of energy used by one of these “giant neurons” to send messages. “I thought I cannot believe personally that nature would waste such energy,” states Alle. Logically, he reasons, as organisms become more complex they waste less energy in sending and receiving neural messages. Alle and his team performed a series of experiments that found that rats’ neurons use less than a third of the energy squid neurons use. This shows that using these neurons for neuroscience may no longer provide an accurate model.
Though the conveniently large size of the neurons closely resemble many aspects of a neuron in a human nervous system, the specific ways in which squid neurons use energy to transmit messages aren’t accurate substitutes for studying the nervous systems of more complex organisms. This seems funny to me that for fifty whole years scientists may have made false conclusions in neuroscience because they were studying a false representation of a human neuron. I wonder how research and experimenting techniques will have to change because of this discovery?
Click here for a few videos that demonstrate the kind of testing that was being done on squid neurons.
1 Response to “Squid Neurons No Longer Legit”
I think that this story was very interesting. Science is supposed to be becoming more and more efficient in its research and it is strange to think that the way we have been trying to become efficient was really not a valid research tool. I was interested in how fMRI and PET scans worked, so I researched them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_neuroimaging). What fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) do is “measure localized changes in cerebral blood flow related to neural activity.” In layman’s terms, they look at the electrical currents in your brain and how they are effecting the blood flow; so, it checks to make sure your brain is communicating well. Here’s my question: if these tests were created by using the research of a squid neuron, are they really accurate?