An automated approach to quantify chemotaxis index in Caenorhabditis nematodes

Crombie, T. A.; Chikuturudzi, C.; Cook, D. E.; Andersen, E.

doi:10.1101/2022.04.30.490142

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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2022.04.30.490142

An automated approach to quantify chemotaxis index in Caenorhabditis nematodes

Crombie, T. A.·Chikuturudzi, C.·Cook, D. E.·Andersen, E.

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Abstract

Chemotaxis assays are used extensively to study behavioral responses of Caenorhabditis nematodes to environmental cues. These assays result in a chemotaxis index (CI) that denotes the behavioral response of a population of nematodes to a particular compound and can range from 1 (maximum attraction) to -1 (maximum avoidance). Traditional chemotaxis assays have low throughput because researchers must manually setup experimental populations and score CIs. Here, we describe an automated methodology that increases throughput by using liquid-handling robots to setup experimental populations and a custom image analysis package, ct, to automate the scoring of CIs from plate images.

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Crombie, T. A., Chikuturudzi, C., Cook, D. E., Andersen, E.. 2022-05-01. An automated approach to quantify chemotaxis index in Caenorhabditis nematodes. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.04.30.490142

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