The neuromechanical basis of locomotion in 3D

Summary

How do animals move? What mechanisms give rise to their adaptability, robustness and resilience? How are they able to modulate their gait and switch seamlessly between different motor behaviours? How do they maintain function while growing, ageing, and subject to circuit reconfiguration, external perturbation and injury? Our group addresses these questions in the microscopic roundworm C. elegans. C. elegans is a leading model system in biology and offers many advantages: it is experimentally tractable, it is genetically, anatomically and developmentally well characterised, and its locomotion behaviours are relative simple, and lend themselves to quantitative measures and mathematical-computational modelling. Locomotor control circuits have many similarities across animal species, so lessons learnt even from a little worm can be relevant to understanding of all motor control, and link with related research on human health. In this project, we are interested in understanding how C. elegans swim in 3D fluids. Nearly all of the research on swimming in this and other species focuses on planar waves. We have an unprecedented corpus of 3D behaviour, consisting of postures and positions of worms over time in different fluids, and revealing fundamentally new biomechanical behaviours. Our next challenge is to determine the neural and neuromechanical basis of these behaviours. A key feature of all undulators and swimmers, including the worm is the tight coupling between the dynamics of neural circuits, the mechanical body and the physical interactions with the environment. To understand adaptation, robustness and resilience therefore requires an integrated brain-body-environment approach. By its nature, this problem is highly multidisciplinary and our group welcomes researchers with complementary expertise, from neuroscience and behaviour, through data analytics and computer vision, to mathematics, physics and computational science. This project is highly interdisciplinary, combining data-driven and theory-driven investigation, and the topic described falls into several disciplines of physics, mathematics and computer science, including active diffusion; soft matter physics; biomechanical control of locomotion; and dynamical systems, and with applications to biorobotics, control engineering and autonomous systems. Prior experience in Neuroscience or Biology is not required. However, you should demonstrate an interest in biology, computational neuroscience and/or biological physics. Projects have the freedom to be predominantly data-driven or theory-driven, and to combine analysis of the dynamics of locomotion in the worm, with mechanistic modelling. Both data-driven and theory-driven work will require you to use and possibly develop mathematical tools or models and to implement these in practice, with programming and computer-based work.

This studentship forms part of a larger collaborative and interdisciplinary project to study the neuromechanical basis of behaviour in the nematode worm C. elegans. Our research combines biological experiments, mathematical and computational modelling of the neural control as well as investigations of the physics of the worm and its interaction with the environment. You will join a multi-disciplinary, dynamic, and creative group within the School of Computing at the University of Leeds, with close ties to the Fluid Dynamics Centre for Doctoral Training, and neuroscience activity in the Faculty of Biological Sciences, where additional biological experimental facilities are housed. Informal enquiries are welcome from all potential candidates.

Selected references:

1. Yuval, O. PhD thesis, University of Leeds (2022) The neuromechanical control of Caenorhabditis elegans head motor behavior in a 3D environment.
2. Ilett, T.P. PhD thesis, University of Leeds (2023) How worms move in 3D.
3. Wang et al. (2022) A monolithic optimal control method for displacement tracking of Cosserat rod with application to reconstruction of C. elegans locomotion. Computational Mechanics.

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