Figure 1.
a) Experimental procedure b) Schematic of chemotaxis assay plate. The locations A and B represent chemoattractant and control spots, respectively. The circles indicate a region with a diameter of 3 cm around the compounds that was used to determine the chemotaxis index. The location C represents the spot at which C. elegans were initially placed and c) Schematic of the harmonic-curvature model that shows skeleton data for worm superimposed with the fit.
Figure 2.
Various shapes of crawling C. elegans.
The corresponding model representations are shown as white lines along the backbone of worms. The experimental images were obtained at 20°C on 2 wt% agar. The ratio for all the shapes are also shown.
Figure 3.
Classification of worm shapes.
a) Probability of shapes of C. elegans classified into ‘regular’ (open) and ‘complex’ (filled) based on the average ratio . The corresponding temperature is shown above the bars and b) average ratio of parameters
for pre-exposed worms as a function of recovery time. The average ratio for control animals is shown as a dashed line.
Figure 4.
Root mean squared distance traveled by the worms as a function of time.
The pre-exposed worms traveled larger distances in the 15 minute window of observation.
Table 1.
Average velocity, calculated from the slope of RMSD curves (Fig. 4) and the net displacement of worms from their respective starting points for control and pre-exposed animals.
Figure 5.
a) travelling forward and b) turning for both pre-exposed (squares) and control (triangles) worms. The dashed-lines are just guides to the eye.
Figure 6.
Probability of reversals for pre-exposed and control worms.
No significant effect of temperature pre-exposure was found on reversals.
Figure 7.
Chemotaxis Indices () of pre-exposed worms as a function of recovery time for three different chemoattractants.
The average chemotaxis indices of control animals are NaOAc = 0.329, NaCl = 0.352, and NH4Cl = 0.356.
Figure 8.
a) Average distance between C. elegans and chemoattractant concentration peak as a function of time during the chemotaxis experiment for control worms (solid) and pre-exposed animals after 0 (dash-dot), 10 (dashed), 20 (dotted), and 30 (dash-dot-dot) minutes and b) speed with which C. elegans approach the concentration peak obtained from slopes of curves in a).
Figure 9.
Fraction of worms traveling towards the concentration peak during chemotaxis as a function of recovery time.
The dashed-line is for control worms.