[MURG] Neuropeptide Function?

[Yan King Yin]

From: digfarenough <digfarenough at yahoo.com>

>say what you will, but you'd be hard-pressed to
>convince me to put my mind in anything less than a
>highly detailed biological simulation
>some (and likely all) of the brain is very finely
>tuned, I'd estimate the effect of varying the dynamics
>in a way like you're proposing would have
>unpredictable effects..

Statistical methods can do the trick.

>>[neuropeptides]
>
>couldn't tell you, but I warn you that such things may
>act quite differently in them than in humans.. for
>instance, serotonin in aplysia plays a very different
>role in plasticity than it does in humans, but that's
>a neuromodulator, not a neuropeptide..

I don't know the details of about serotonin, but I
guess if we trace the evolutionary tree from aplysia
up to humans we can actually find out how the role of
serotonin has changed, or *duplicated* and then changed.
Phylogeny is a wealth of information that can be
exploited to gain insight to the brain.

(But it's also possible that aplysia simply branched
off and invented its own use of serotonin.)

One more important point is that, in primitive nerve
nets such as those in Hydra, C elegans, or aplysia,
the peptides are transmitted through chemical synapses
on axons, so it's not paracrine secretion and thus is
more likely to do with information processing rather
than housekeeping...

YKY


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