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

@article{Ding:2020:10.1534/genetics.119.302804,
author = {Ding, SS and Romenskyy, M and Sarkisyan, KS and Brown, AEX},
doi = {10.1534/genetics.119.302804},
journal = {Genetics},
title = {Measuring Caenorhabditis elegans spatial foraging and food intake using bioluminescent bacteria},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1534/genetics.119.302804},
year = {2020}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - For most animals, feeding includes two behaviors: 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 behaviors. However, most methods of measuring feeding in worms quantify either foraging behavior or food intake but not both. Imaging the depletion of fluorescently labeled 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 within the cluster before foraging collectively for more food; similarly, during large population swarming, only worms at the migrating front are in contact with bacteria. These results demonstrate the usefulness of bioluminescent bacteria for quantifying feeding and for generating insights into the spatial pattern of food consumption.
AU  - Ding,SS
AU  - Romenskyy,M
AU  - Sarkisyan,KS
AU  - Brown,AEX
DO  - 10.1534/genetics.119.302804
PY  - 2020///
SN  - 0016-6731
TI  - Measuring Caenorhabditis elegans spatial foraging and food intake using bioluminescent bacteria
T2  - Genetics
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1534/genetics.119.302804
ER  -
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