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.

Megapixel camera arrays enable high-resolution animal tracking in multiwell plates.

Tracking small laboratory animals such as flies, fish, and worms is used for phenotyping in neuroscience, genetics, disease modelling, and drug discovery. An imaging system with sufficient throughput and spatiotemporal resolution would be capable of imaging a large number of animals, estimating their pose, and quantifying detailed behavioural differences at a scale where hundreds of treatments could be tested simultaneously. Here we report an array of six 12-megapixel cameras that record all the wells of a 96-well plate with sufficient resolution to estimate the pose of C.

Comparison of solitary and collective foraging strategies of in patchy food distributions.

Collective foraging has been shown to benefit organisms in environments where food is patchily distributed, but whether this is true in the case where organisms do not rely on long-range communications to coordinate their collective behaviour has been understudied. To address this question, we use the tractable laboratory model organism , where a social strain ( mutant) and a solitary strain (N2) are available for direct comparison of foraging strategies. We first developed an on-lattice minimal model for comparing collective and solitary foraging strategies, finding that social agents benefit from feeding faster and more efficiently simply owing to group formation.

Measuring Spatial Foraging and Food Intake Using Bioluminescent Bacteria.

For most animals, feeding includes two behaviors: foraging to find a food patch and food intake once a patch is found. The nematode is a useful model for studying the genetics of both behaviors. However, most methods of measuring feeding in worms quantify either foraging behavior or food intake, but not both.

Non-muscle myosin II is required for correct fate specification in the Caenorhabditis elegans seam cell divisions.

During development, cell division often generates two daughters with different developmental fates. Distinct daughter identities can result from the physical polarity and size asymmetry itself, as well as the subsequent activation of distinct fate programmes in each daughter. Asymmetric divisions are a feature of the C.

The C. elegans TPR Containing Protein, TRD-1, Regulates Cell Fate Choice in the Developing Germ Line and Epidermis.

Correct cell fate choice is crucial in development. In post-embryonic development of the hermaphroditic Caenorhabitis elegans, distinct cell fates must be adopted in two diverse tissues. In the germline, stem cells adopt one of three possible fates: mitotic cell cycle, or gamete formation via meiosis, producing either sperm or oocytes.

Goose RIG-I functions in innate immunity against Newcastle disease virus infections.

Mammalian retinoic acid-inducible gene I (RIG-I) is a chief antiviral gene sensing viral RNA molecules including Newcastle disease virus (NDV). In this study, goose RIG-I gene (gRIG-I) was identified. The 2805 bp-long gene encodes a gRIG-I protein that exhibits 93.