Adapting and optimizing GCaMP8f for use in Caenorhabditis elegans.

Improved genetically encoded calcium indicators (GECIs) are essential for capturing intracellular dynamics of both muscle and neurons. A novel set of GECIs with ultrafast kinetics and high sensitivity was recently reported by Zhang et al. (2023).

Fantastic beasts and how to study them: rethinking experimental animal behavior.

Humans have been trying to understand animal behavior at least since recorded history. Recent rapid development of new technologies has allowed us to make significant progress in understanding the physiological and molecular mechanisms underlying behavior, a key goal of neuroethology. However, there is a tradeoff when studying animal behavior and its underlying biological mechanisms: common behavior protocols in the laboratory are designed to be replicable and controlled, but they often fail to encompass the variability and breadth of natural behavior.

The Bacterial G Signal Transduction Inhibitor FR900359 Impairs Soil-Associated Nematodes.

The cyclic depsipeptide FR900359 (FR) is derived from the soil bacterium Chromobacterium vaccinii and known to bind G proteins of mammals and insects, thereby abolishing the signal transduction of their G protein-coupled receptors, a process that leads to severe physiological consequences. Due to their highly conserved structure, G family of proteins are a superior ecological target for FR producing organisms, resulting in a defense towards a broad range of harmful organisms. Here, we focus on the question whether bacteria like C.

C. elegans is not a robust model organism for the magnetic sense.

Magnetoreception is defined as the ability to sense and use the Earth's magnetic field, for example to orient and direct movements. The receptors and sensory mechanisms underlying behavioral responses to magnetic fields remain unclear. A previous study described magnetoreception in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, which requires the activity of a single pair of sensory neurons.

Automatically tracking feeding behavior in populations of foraging .

feeds on bacteria and other small microorganisms which it ingests using its pharynx, a neuromuscular pump. Currently, measuring feeding behavior requires tracking a single animal, indirectly estimating food intake from population-level metrics, or using restrained animals. To enable large throughput feeding measurements of unrestrained, crawling worms on agarose plates at a single worm resolution, we developed an imaging protocol and a complementary image analysis tool called PharaGlow.

The role of food odor in invertebrate foraging.

Foraging for food is an integral part of animal survival. In small insects and invertebrates, multisensory information and optimized locomotion strategies are used to effectively forage in patchy and complex environments. Here, the importance of olfactory cues for effective invertebrate foraging is discussed in detail.

Decoding locomotion from population neural activity in moving .

We investigated the neural representation of locomotion in the nematode by recording population calcium activity during movement. We report that population activity more accurately decodes locomotion than any single neuron. Relevant signals are distributed across neurons with diverse tunings to locomotion.

Turning away from danger.

The flexible escape behavior exhibited by in response to threats relies on a combination of feedback and feedforward circuits.

Tuning molecular motor transport through cytoskeletal filament network organization.

Within cells, crosslinking proteins organize cytoskeletal filaments both temporally and spatially to create dynamic and structurally diverse networks. Molecular motors move on these networks for both force generation and transport processes. How the transport statistics depend on the network architecture remains poorly characterized.

Distinct unfolded protein responses mitigate or mediate effects of nonlethal deprivation of C. elegans sleep in different tissues.

Background: Disrupting sleep during development leads to lasting deficits in chordates and arthropods. To address lasting impacts of sleep deprivation in Caenorhabditis elegans, we established a nonlethal deprivation protocol.

Results: Deprivation triggered protective insulin-like signaling and two unfolded protein responses (UPRs): the mitochondrial (UPR) and the endoplasmic reticulum (UPR) responses.

Stochastic feeding dynamics arise from the need for information and energy.

Animals regulate their food intake in response to the available level of food. Recent observations of feeding dynamics in small animals showed feeding patterns of bursts and pauses, but their function is unknown. Here, we present a data-driven decision-theoretical model of feeding in Our central assumption is that food intake serves a dual purpose: to gather information about the external food level and to ingest food when the conditions are good.

Serotonin-dependent kinetics of feeding bursts underlie a graded response to food availability in C. elegans.

Animals integrate physiological and environmental signals to modulate their food uptake. The nematode C. elegans, whose food uptake consists of pumping bacteria from the environment into the gut, provides excellent opportunities for discovering principles of conserved regulatory mechanisms.

Disturbance Regimes Predictably Alter Diversity in an Ecologically Complex Bacterial System.

Unlabelled: Diversity is often associated with the functional stability of ecological communities from microbes to macroorganisms. Understanding how diversity responds to environmental perturbations and the consequences of this relationship for ecosystem function are thus central challenges in microbial ecology. Unimodal diversity-disturbance relationships, in which maximum diversity occurs at intermediate levels of disturbance, have been predicted for ecosystems where life history tradeoffs separate organisms along a disturbance gradient.

A scalable method for automatically measuring pharyngeal pumping in C. elegans.

Background: The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is widely used for studying small neural circuits underlying behavior. In particular, the rhythmic feeding motions collectively termed pharyngeal pumping are regulated by a nearly autonomous network of 20 neurons of 14 types. Despite much progress achieved through laser ablation, genetics, electrophysiology, and optogenetics, key questions regarding the regulation of pumping remain open.