Tracks of human thought are found in worm brain

In the human beings, the cerebral cortex, the layer most exterior of the brain, is had as one of main the responsible ones for the creative and analytical thought. However, always it was a mystery of that way this part of the brain evolved.

Now, researchers tell that something similar to a cerebral cortex exists in a marine worm of the Nereididae family, a small creature with old roots who did not suffer alterations in hundreds from millions of years. The discovery appears in the magazine “Cell”.

“It can be said that the topography is so similar that the human being and the worm must come of ancestral a common one”, says Detlev Arendt, researcher of the European Laboratory of Molecular Biology and one of the authors of the study.

To lead its research, Arendt and its colleagues had used one technique called cellular definition profile to determine which genes had been activated and disactivated in the cells of the brain of the worm. This type of profile definition provides a molecular footprint for each cell.

Curiously, the molecular footprint in certain parts of the brain of the worm, known as corpora pedunculata, was very similar to the cerebral cortex.

The corpora pedunculata supposedly controls the olfativos directions of the worm, and can have helped ancestral common between worms and the human beings to find food while it was crawled for the deep one of the sea.

“Now that we open the way to study the corpora pedunculata, we can try to understand what this cerebral structure is making, what it is capable to make, and if it was important in the hunting of female prisoners”, affirms Arendt.