A robotic microscope reveals the neural computation in worms for navigation

National brain projects are being conducted in the US, EU, the major Asian countries etc, in which big brain data at the GB and TB levels are generated from many laboratories everyday. However, techniques to analyze these big data are very limited, which becomes one of the big problems in brain science. In order to establish a method of brain data analysis with a small brain and to apply the method to a larger brain eventually, we are analyzing the brain of a round worm, the nematode C. elegans. In this paper, we report a robot microscope system OSaCaBeN, which automatically tracks a behaving worm under a virtual odor gradient and measures its neural activity. Our integrated analyses of behavior and neural activity will reveal novel principles of brain computation during animal's navigation.