Roundworms May Be the Answer to Alzheimer's Disease
Like humans, roundworms learn to respond to different triggers from experience
In a study published in bioRxiv, animals learn just like humans do. When they learn, they change their behavior. This learning prepares the organisms to understand and incorporate the information from their experience. In return, this enables them to produce enough resources to anticipate danger.
As observed in their experiment, it showed that the initial encounter of the roundworms to the smell of the harmful bacteria gave it a high chance of survival in their actual exposure. The prior odor enabled them to produce enough HSF1, its molecular chaperones. The whole process of producing this gene expression requires serotonin. Serotonin pushes the HSF1 to upgrade its production of molecular chaperone genes. This discovery led to a study that shows that roundworms have a better chance of survival when confronted with preemptive and initiating transcriptional mechanisms. This study also provides a probable basis for the incredible role of environmental enrichment in diseases and other conditions.