Biology subjects

Nimpf, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Nimpf, S..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

Revised testing procedures do not elicit magnetoreceptive behavior in C. elegans

A diverse range of species is known to rely on the Earths magnetic field for spatial information. Vidal-Gadea et al. claimed that C. elegans are magneto-sensitive, exploiting the magnetic field to guide their burrowing behavior [1]. Our attempts to replicate their findings were unsuccessful [2], which Vidal-Gadea attributed to the satiety of the animals and the environment in which they were raised. Here, we report our repeated experiments, having adopted several suggestions proposed by Vidal-Gadea et al. [3]. We find that shortening the length of the behavioral assay and raising the animals in a Faraday cage does not result in magnetotactic behavior. We reluctantly conclude that the assays employed by Vidal-Gadea are not robust or C. elegans are not magneto-sensitive.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2017

Are Caenorhabditis elegans magnetoreceptive?

A diverse array of species on the planet employ the Earths magnetic field as a navigational aid. As the majority of these animals are migratory, their utility to interrogate the molecular and cellular basis of the magnetic sense is limited. Vidal-Gadea and colleagues recently argued that the worm C. elegans possesses a magnetic sense that guides their vertical movement in soil. In making this claim they relied on three different behavioural assays that involved magnetic stimuli. Here, we set out to replicate their results employing blinded protocols and double wrapped coils that control for heat generation. We find no evidence supporting the existence of a magnetic sense in C. elegans. We further show that the Vidal-Gadea hypothesis is problematic as the adoption of a correction angle and a fixed trajectory relative to the Earths magnetic inclination does not necessarily result in vertical movement.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2016

ISCA1 and CRY4: An improbable proposition

This manuscript was submitted to Nature Materials on December 15th 2015.\n\nIn their recent manuscript Xie and colleagues argue that the pigeon ISCA1/CRY4 complex acts as a magnetic protein biocompass having unambiguously proved that these two proteins interact forming a complex with unique biophysical features (1). We do not think the evidence presented in the manuscript supports this conclusion. Firstly, the authors provide no data (such as a reciprocal co-immunoprecipitation from retinal tissue) that demonstrates that ISCA1 and CRY4 interact in vivo, instead the conclusions are based primarily on overexpression in E.coli and in vitro reconstitution experiments. Secondly, their experiments have not employed the correct full length version of CRY4. The CRY4 protein expressed by Xie and colleagues was only 497 amino acids in length. We extracted mRNA from the pigeon retina (Invitrogen, 610.11), generated cDNA (Clontech, 121311), and performed rap ...

animal behavior and cognition↗