Equal samples of synapse records reversed the short cycle contrast between two early and two adult C. elegans maps at an edge threshold of one record

We tested whether the adult excess of short directed cycles remained after equal synapse sampling. Eight distinct C. elegans brain maps supplied a fixed panel of 162 neurons present from birth. The main contrast used two early maps, at 0 and 5 hours, and two adult maps, at 50 hours. An edge required at least one sampled synapse record. Full reciprocal pair means rose from 70.50 to 228.50. Full three-neuron cycle means rose from 75.00 to 507.00. Exact uniform samples of 588 synapse records reversed both differences. The adult means had 13.33% fewer reciprocal pairs and 23.05% fewer three-neuron cycles. We kept all targets of each sampled site together. Inclusion and exclusion gave exact expectations because cycle edges have different source neurons. Contact and binary edge samples gave the same direction. Fixing each source neuron's sample count gave nearly equal three-cycle means, 54.9134 early and 54.8990 adult. At a threshold of three sampled records per edge, uniform site samples gave more adult three-cycles: 1.6022 versus 1.0731. Thus the contrast depended on sample allocation and edge definition. These results describe the recorded finite graphs. Two animals per endpoint cannot establish a population age effect or biological feedback. The package preserves the compact data, source version and hashes, code, exact results, all controls, figures, and repeat instructions.

C. elegans · developmental connectomics · directed cycles · synapse sampling · rarefaction · polyadic synapses · finite graph expectation · reproducible research