Tracking C . elegans Populations in Fluid Environments for the Study of Different Locomotory Behaviors

—We present here a novel automated computer-based approach for analyzing the locomotion of multiple C. elegans in low resolution images, based on computer vision methods. With our method, we can provide information on the position of the nematodes, their trajectory and the shape of their body during locomotion. Moreover, our method is designed to efficiently track animals and extract locomotion features in cluttered images and under lighting variations. We use this method to analyze C. elegans swimming for the first time in detail and we report features of nematode swimming not previously noted. With our method we were able to distinguish differences between the swimming patterns of different mutants that at first glance appear the same. Finally, in this paper we show numerical results for the swimming patters of different mutants, and we describe some of our findings.

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