High-Throughput Behavioral Analysis in C. elegans

By N. A. Swierczek, A. Giles, Catharine H. Rankin, Rex A. Kerr. Nature Methods, 2011

452 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We designed a real-time computer vision system, the Multi-Worm Tracker (MWT), which can simultaneously quantify the behavior of dozens of Caenorhabditis elegans on a Petri plate at video rates. We examined three traditional behavioral paradigms using this system: spontaneous movement on food, where the behavior changes over tens of minutes; chemotaxis, where turning events must be detected accurately to determine strategy; and habituation of response to tap, where the response is stochastic and changes over time. In each case, manual analysis or automated single-worm tracking would be tedious and time-consuming, but the MWT system allowed rapid quantification of behavior with minimal human effort. Thus, this system will enable large-scale forward and reverse genetic screens for complex behaviors.

Subfields: Aging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e2039f70226a2829c50ed3fa4edb416c6781cc1