QUANTITATIVE PHENOTYPING OF C.ELEGANS BEHAVIOR IN AN AUTOMATED MICROSYSTEM

Caenorhabditis elegans is an excellent model system for studying the genetics and neuronal basis of behavior. Studying C. elegans behavior gives insight into how networks of neurons integrate environmental cues to produce specific behavior. Current behavior experiments are labor intensive and lacking precise control of the stimuli. This manual behavior analysis can introduce bias, is less quantitative and low in throughput due to limited statistics. Here we present an automated microsystem for quantitative population experiments. Worms are placed in a pillar gradient device made of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) to study the effect of ethanol on locomotion and chemotaxis.