{"doi":"10.1111/acel.13146","title":"Age‐dependent changes in response property and morphology of a thermosensory neuron and thermotaxis behavior in <i>Caenorhabditis elegans</i>","abstract":"Age-dependent cognitive and behavioral deterioration may arise from defects in different components of the nervous system, including those of neurons, synapses, glial cells, or a combination of them. We find that AFD, the primary thermosensory neuron of Caenorhabditis elegans, in aged animals is characterized by loss of sensory ending integrity, including reduced actin-based microvilli abundance and aggregation of thermosensory guanylyl cyclases. At the functional level, AFD neurons in aged animals are hypersensitive to high temperatures and show sustained sensory-evoked calcium dynamics, resulting in a prolonged operating range. At the behavioral level, senescent animals display cryophilic behaviors that remain plastic to acute temperature changes. Excessive cyclase activity of the AFD-specific guanylyl cyclase, GCY-8, is associated with developmental defects in AFD sensory ending and cryophilic behavior. Surprisingly, loss of the GCY-8 cyclase domain reduces these age-dependent morphological and behavioral changes, while a prolonged AFD operating range still exists in gcy-8 animals. The lack of apparent correlation between age-dependent changes in the morphology or stimuli-evoked response properties of primary sensory neurons and those in related behaviors highlights the importance of quantitative analyses of aging features when interpreting age-related changes at structural and functional levels. Our work identifies aging hallmarks in AFD receptive ending, temperature-evoked AFD responses, and experience-based thermotaxis behavior, which serve as a foundation to further elucidate the neural basis of cognitive aging.","journal":"Aging Cell","year":2020,"id":99872,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":29,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9594,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":491494,"name":"Hironori J. Matsuyama","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":490863,"name":"Yuki Tsukada","orcid":"0000-0002-1637-2170","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":490864,"name":"Aakanksha Singhvi","orcid":"0000-0001-5782-8536","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":490865,"name":"Ru‐Ting Syu","orcid":"0000-0001-8828-4885","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":320547,"name":"Yun Lu","orcid":"0000-0002-0992-9399","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":233475,"name":"Shai Shaham","orcid":"0000-0002-3751-975X","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":490866,"name":"Ikue Mori","orcid":"0000-0003-2116-8825","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":490867,"name":"Chun‐Liang Pan","orcid":"0000-0003-0108-3138","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":490862,"name":"Tzu‐Ting Huang","orcid":"0000-0001-6559-758X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":45,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T22:38:09.754371Z","pmid":"32307902","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}