TAXISCAN, Optimizing throughput and behavioral depth in standard C. elegans chemotaxis assays

Chemosensory signaling is crucial for organisms to respond to their environment and dysfunctions in these complex pathways have been implicated in diseases such as neurological disorders. The nematode C. elegans is a useful tool for studying chemosensation as it offers a fully-mapped nervous system with relatively simple chemosensory circuits. One of the most common methods to quantify chemosensory function in worms is through chemotaxis assays, which require extensive time and manual effort. In this work, we sought to capture novel chemosensory metrics and increase the throughput of these assays by combining rapid image acquisition with bioinformatics processing. In doing so, we have developed a Technique for Automating chemotaXis Investigations using Simple-Capture Approaches in Nematodes (TAXISCAN), a rapid acquisition platform that can be used to study natural chemosensory behavior as well as to characterize behavioral and locomotion phenotypes in half the time of standard assays.