DAVIS -- One of the deep problems in neurobiology is how an animal’s nervous system coordinates movements in all parts of the body. Now thanks to a grant of nearly $1 million, a neurobiologist and a mathematician at UC Davis are poised to find the answer.

“What’s exciting about receiving this grant is that it will let us test a new way of describing and thinking about how all coordinating circuits perform,” said Brian Mulloney, a professor of biological sciences in the Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior. “We don’t know if our idea is right, but we’ve got all the parts to test it. And if it is correct, then the medical impact of the work will eventually be very great.”

The Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience program, which is a joint initiative between the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, has awarded $963,426 to Mulloney and Timothy J. Lewis, an associate professor of mathematics. The grant will allow the two to follow up on a decade’s worth of studies led by Mulloney. Those studies identified and mapped the organization of the key nerve cells that coordinate movements of a crayfish’s swimmerets: small appendages on the animal’s abdomen that propel it through the water.

Crayfish, with their simplified neural circuitry and nerve cells that are easily accessible to impulse-recording electrodes, are ideal animals for studying the basis of movement. Although they are crustaceans -- a class of animals without spinal cords -- the nervous system that controls locomotion is very stable across different animal groups, Mulloney said. In crayfish as well as mammals, neural circuits of the central nervous system coordinate limb movement by distributing information from each limb to other parts of the system.

With support from the NSF/NIH grant, Mulloney and Lewis will combine mathematical theory with biological experimentation to construct a comprehensive model of the crayfish’s entire swimmeret neural circuitry, and then explore how this architecture interacts with properties of the nerve cells and processes occurring at nerve junctions (synapses) to produce stable, coordinated locomotion.

“If we succeed in our efforts, we’ll have a much better basis for understanding the organization of the spinal cord and brain stem in all organisms,” Mulloney said. “And that will bring us many steps closer to finding treatments for a range of neural system diseases and disorders.”

The award is one of about 20 grants totaling around $8 million that the campus has already received from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. This “stimulus package,” which President Barack Obama signed into law in February, allocated $8.2 billion to NIH and $3 billion to NSF for research grants.