AVKL, AVKR

Type: Interneuron In MoW: AVK Male Wiring Project: AVKL,AVKR In Wormbase: AVK, AVKL, AVKR Lineage: AB plpapapap, AB prpapapap Location: Ventral ganglion of head Description: Ring and ventral cord interneuron. Mainly postsynaptic in ventral cord and presynaptic in ring. After making a full loop around the nerve ring, AVKR axon runs posteriorly on the left side of the ventral cord while AVKL axon runs on the right side of the ventral cord. In males, AVKL has input from PDER and AVKR makes gap junctions to hypodermis and PVS (Jarrell et al., 2012) Neurotransmitter/ Neuropeptide: - FLP-1; FMRFamide-like peptide (Nelson et al., 1998) Innexin expression: - INX-2 - INX-6 - INX-7 - INX-8 - INX-9 - INX-12 - INX-18 - INX-19 - UNC-7 - UNC-9 (Altun et al., 2009) Receptor expression: - GLR-5; glutamate receptor subunit (Brockie et al., 2001) Function:

The three neurons, AIM, AIY and AVK resemble pearls-on-a-string, located posterior and slightly more superficial to the excretory cell nucleus on the right and left sides of the head.
The nucleus of the excretory cell is the biggest one on the ventral side, below the terminal bulb of the pharynx and looks like an egg with a sunny-side-up appearance. The three neuronal nuclei can easily be located immediately posterior to the excretory cell nucleus, the most anterior one being AIM, the middle, AIY, and the most posterior one, AVK. On the right side, sometimes RIS nucleus accompanies these three nuclei.
Cell and axon structures of AIY and AIM are very similar; care must be taken to differentiate between the two when identifying these two cells with fluorescent markers.