Imperial College London
Alternate

DrAndreBrown

Faculty of Medicine, Institute of Clinical Sciences

Reader in Behavioural Phenomics
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 3313 8218andre.brown

 
 
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Location

 

4.15BLMS BuildingHammersmith Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@unpublished{Ding:2019:10.1101/759928,
author = {Ding, SS and Sarkisyan, K and Brown, A},
doi = {10.1101/759928},
publisher = {bioRxiv},
title = {Measuring C. elegans spatial foraging and food intake using bioluminescent bacteria},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/759928},
year = {2019}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - UNPB
AB  - ABSTRACT For most animals, feeding includes two behaviours: foraging to find a food patch and food intake once a patch is found. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a useful model for studying the genetics of both behaviours. However, most methods of measuring feeding in worms quantify either foraging behaviour or food intake but not both. Imaging the depletion of fluorescently labelled bacteria provides information on both the distribution and amount of consumption, but even after patch exhaustion a prominent background signal remains, which complicates quantification. Here, we used a bioluminescent Escherichia coli strain to quantify C. elegans feeding. With light emission tightly coupled to active metabolism, only living bacteria are capable of bioluminescence so the signal is lost upon ingestion. We quantified the loss of bioluminescence using N2 reference worms and eat-2 mutants, and found a nearly 100-fold increase in signal-to-background ratio and lower background compared to loss of fluorescence. We also quantified feeding using aggregating npr-1 mutant worms. We found that groups of npr-1 mutants first clear bacteria from each other before foraging collectively for more food; similarly, during high density swarming, only worms at the migrating front are in contact with bacteria. These results demonstrate the usefulness of bioluminescent bacteria for quantifying feeding and suggest a hygiene hypothesis for the function of C. elegans aggregation and swarming.
AU  - Ding,SS
AU  - Sarkisyan,K
AU  - Brown,A
DO  - 10.1101/759928
PB  - bioRxiv
PY  - 2019///
TI  - Measuring C. elegans spatial foraging and food intake using bioluminescent bacteria
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/759928
UR  - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/759928v1
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/75854
ER  -
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