NOVEMBER 19 • 2020 | 23

NOVEMBER 2020

ENGINEERING
POSSIBILITIES

Underwater creatures
may be key to medical
innovations

There is extraordinary work being done at
MSU’
s Institute for Quantitative Health
Science and Engineering (IQ), thanks to a
team headed up by neuroscientist and
neuroengineer Galit Pelled and funded by
a recent $2.35 million grant from the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Brain
Initiative Award.

Pelled’
s discoveries could be used to
create prosthetics that humans can
control with their brains, but in order to
get there, Pelled and her team are
drawing inspiration and insight from an
unexpected study subject: the California
octopus.

Pelled developed a fascination with the
octopus as an undergraduate in Israel,
and now her lab is home to four of them,
each held in a separate saltwater tank,
where they are being observed and
analyzed using waterproof motion
cameras, artificial intelligence software
and electrodes embedded in their
tentacles.

Continued on page 2

Professor Galit Pelled (center right, standing) guides a team of researchers including students,
post-docs and technicians. (Photo taken in February 2020, prior to the university-wide mask mandate.)

Pelled and her husband Assaf Gilad, also a
researcher, discovered that glass catfish possess a
gene that helps them navigate murky water with
help from the Earth’
s magnetic poles.

MICHIGAN STATE
U N I V E R S I T Y

Armed with knowledge

The octopus is a remarkably dexterous and
clever animal, able to make precise
movements with all eight arms, change its skin
color for self-defense and communication and
even regenerate parts of its body after an
injury.

“Each arm of an octopus contains an axial
nerve that functions like a vertebrate’
s spinal
cord, yet with a limitless range of movement,”
Pelled says. “This is why the octopus provides
an unparalleled model to study central
sensorimotor circuits associated with grasping
behavior. If these movements can be
described in mathematical terms, it may be
possible to create an arm brace that a person
could control with their brain.”

Seeing through to solutions

The octopus isn’
t the only underwater creature
in Pelled’
s lab whose unique attributes are
contributing to innovations that will ultimately
help humans. Glass catfish, a species of
freshwater fish native to Thailand, are being
studied, too, and for that, Pelled has the
partnership of a fellow researcher: her
husband, Assaf Gilad, professor of biomedical
engineering and radiology.

The two came to Michigan State from Johns
Hopkins several years ago, but both earned
their university degrees in Israel—Pelled at
Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Gilad at
Technion Israel Institute of Technology and
Weizmann Institute of Science in Haifa and
Rehovot, respectively.

For the last several years, the work of Gilad,
Pelled and their teams has centered around a
microscopically tiny part of the glass catfish: a
single navigational gene that responds to
Earth’
s electromagnetic fields.