Developmental trajectory of Caenorhabditis elegans nervous system governs its structural organization
Fig 5
Symmetrically paired neurons have a high probability of being connected and also exhibit strong association in their birth times and spatial positions.
(A) Bilaterally symmetric neurons that are positioned on the left and right of the body axis of the organism tend to have a much higher probability of synaptic, as well as, gap junctional connections between them, compared to that for all pairs of neurons. In addition, the synapses are highly likely to be reciprocal (bidirectional). (B) The distribution of lineage distances between paired neurons shows that the mean value is lower than that for all neurons. We note that almost all lineage distances between symmetric neurons are odd-valued suggesting that they occur at the same rung of the lineage tree. (C-D) Symmetrically paired neurons have cell bodies located in physical proximity of each other (C) and are born close in time as indicated by low birth-time differences Δtb (D), compared to all pairs of neurons.