Among the most intriguing discoveries lies within the ventral nerve cord (VNC), a key component of the central nervous system ...

Scientists have discovered an interesting piece of the evolutionary puzzle: how the ventral nerve cord evolved in ecdysozoan animals, a group that includes insects, nematodes, and priapulid worms.

The ventral nerve cord is the area of the fruit fly’s nervous system that controls most of its movement, also called its motor functions. There are a variety of different broad classes of neurons that ...

To do so, Lehmann screened 5,500 fly lines for gene expression in the ventral nerve cord, similar to the spinal cord in vertebrates, in the stage just prior to metamorphosis. By studying how gene ...