Rajarshi Ghosh
Lewis Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey
USA

Josué Sznitman
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Technion
Israel Institute of Technology
Haifa
Israel

Nematode swimming in an aqueous drop

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a well-known model organism used for biological research including genetics and neuroscience. One way to link genes or disease with behavior is found by characterizing the locomotion of this roundworm in different environments, a technique known as motility phenotyping. Here, a healthy wild-type nematode (approximately 1 mm long) is observed swimming in confinement within an aqueous drop (top view) and exhibits a bias towards swimming near the drop edge. By sampling the image sequence with a given frequency (fs =1.86 Hz), we can reconstruct this stroboscopic-like snapshot by superimposing all the nematode's positions onto a single image. This image reconstruction highlights the regular, smooth pattern of the undulatory swimming gait of C. elegans, characterized by travelling waves at a beating frequency of approximately 2 Hz (image displayed in synthetic colors).

Related Abstract

  Motility analysis of the nematode C. elegans on wet soft media

Reporters and Editors

This image can be freely reproduced with the accompanying credit: "R. Ghosh (Princeton University) and J. Sznitman (Technion)."