TY  - GEN
T1  - Affordable Caenorhabditis elegans tracking system for classroom use
AU  - Leonard, Nicholas
AU  - Vidal-Gadea, Andrés G.
DO  - 10.17912/micropub.biology.000377
UR  - http://beta.micropublication.org/journals/biology/micropub-biology-000377/
AB  - From the beginning of Caenorhabditis elegans’ inception as a genetic model organism by Sydney Brenner (Brenner 1974), the ability to measure and quantify behavior in these nematodes led to numerous and powerful insights (Apfeld et al. 2018). The experimental amenability of worms makes them not just superb research subjects but also useful pedagogical tools. While excellent classroom additions to illustrate many biological processes, the educational potential of worms has lagged due to the expensive equipment required for their study. In most educational settings, lack of equipment discourages individual exploration and falls short of the promise owed to young and driven students. One of the places where this is felt strongly is in the automated quantification of animal behavior. Many systems have been developed over the years (and are currently used across the world) for the rapid and unbiased quantification of behavioral phenotypes. For example, we used tracking systems to compare the ability of mutant C. elegans strains to transition between gaits (Vidal-Gadea et al. 2011), and Deng and colleagues used them to study the role of inhibitory GABAergic motorneurons during rapid locomotion (Deng et al. 2020, see Husson et al. 2012 for a review of the use of tracking systems in C. elegans). Until recently, the automated quantification of C. elegans behavior was only feasible in specialized labs. Recent advances have begun to reduce the expense and complexity of automatically quantifying animal behavior. For example, the Haspel lab at NJIT made use of the recently developed Tierpsy behavioral software (Avelino et al. 2018) to build numerous animal tracking systems that are user friendly, and able to achieve levels of kinematic analysis that previously required considerably more expensive setups (Deng et al. 2020).
PY  - 2021
JO  - microPublication Biology
ER  -