Current Biology
Volume 29, Issue 11, 3 June 2019, Pages 1807-1817.e3
Journal home page for Current Biology

Article
Mapping the Whole-Body Muscle Activity of Hydra vulgaris

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.05.012Get rights and content
Under an Elsevier user license
open archive

Highlights

  • Calcium imaging of the activity of the entire musculature of Hydra

  • 7 spatiotemporal activity patterns include global, local, and propagating activity

  • Orthogonal ectodermal and endodermal muscles jointly activated during contraction

  • Multifunctional epitheliomuscular cells participate in multiple distinct patterns

Summary

Hydra is a cnidarian polyp with an anatomically simple neuromuscular system that can offer evolutionary insights on the functional design of animal body plans. Using calcium imaging to map the activity of the entire epitheliomuscular system of behaving Hydra, we find seven basic spatiotemporal patterns of muscle activity. Patterns include global and local activation events with widely varying kinetics of initiation and wave-like propagation. The orthogonally oriented endodermal and ectodermal muscle fibers are jointly activated during longitudinal contractions. Individual epitheliomuscular cells can participate in multiple patterns, even with very different kinetics. This cellular multifunctionality could enable the structurally simple epitheliomuscular tissue of basal metazoans to implement a diverse behavioral output.

Keywords

basal metazoa
Cnidaria
Hydra
calcium imaging
muscle
neuromuscular systems
epithelia
emergence
animal evolution
neural evolution

Cited by (0)

3

Lead Contact