Microfluidic electric parallel egg-laying assay and application to in-vivo toxicity screening of microplastics using C. elegans.

Environmental pollutants like microplastics are posing health concerns on aquatic animals and the ecosystem. Microplastic toxicity studies using Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) as a model are evolving but methodologically hindered from obtaining statistically strong data sets, detecting toxicity effects based on microplastics uptake, and correlating physiological and behavioural effects at an individual-worm level.

Electric egg-laying: a new approach for regulating egg-laying behaviour in a microchannel using electric field.

In this paper, the novel effect of electric field (EF) on adult C. elegans egg-laying in a microchannel is discovered and correlated with neural and muscular activities. The quantitative effects of worm aging and EF strength, direction, and exposure duration on egg-laying are studied phenotypically using egg-count, body length, head movement, and transient neuronal activity readouts.

Parallel-Channel Electrotaxis and Neuron Screening of .

In this paper, we report a novel microfluidic method to conduct a electrotaxis movement assay and neuronal imaging on up to 16 worms in parallel. is a model organism for neurodegenerative disease and movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease (PD), and for screening chemicals that alleviate protein aggregation, neuronal death, and movement impairment in PD. Electrotaxis of in microfluidic channels has led to the development of neurobehavioral screening platforms, but enhancing the throughput of the electrotactic behavioral assay has remained a challenge.