Nematodes have previously unknown learning abilities that help them avoid harm, researchers in National Taiwan University’s College of Medicine have found.
When nematodes, commonly known as roundworms, encounter cellular stress, they can create memories of those experiences using serotonin pathways to avoid a recurrence of the harmful experience, National Taiwan University Institute of Molecular Medicine professor Pan Chun-liang (潘俊良) said yesterday.
The discovery has important implications for the understanding of how organisms survive, Pan said.
The findings of Pan’s research team have been published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
The team focused