Quote:
Originally Posted by debdodd  I remember once he was talking about his class (when he was teaching at Cornell) were dissecting snail brains and I was thinking uhhhhhh why? I mean honestly isn't a snail just slime with a shell? evidently it has some value 'cause they were playing with em ..... go figure ....  |
The snail dissection is of a remarkable snail with only a few hundred neurons in its brain. The internal organs are all vibrantly colored, so the dissection is easy and the brain cells are gigantic so they are easy to pierce with extremely fine tipped electrodes. We use these cells to conduct voltage clamp experiments.
This is where we use a pair of electrodes to place the cell membrane at a fixed voltage and then change it to see what kind of electrically excitable properties we can find. These are fundamental properties that describe how neurons respond to incoming information.
The part of the brain that we work with looks like a pink polka-dot bikini top wrapped around the esophagus of the animal. We anesthetize them using a 10% listerine solution (go figure).
The specific type of snail we use is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lymnaea
Cool stuff.