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.