Analysis of the behavior response of Caenorhabditis elegans to physical stimuli in microfluidic enviornment

초록

Caenorhabditis elegans is a transparent, fully differentiated multicellular organism. Its neural circuits are similar to that of mammalian and about 40% of the C.elegans genes have homologs in the human genome. Therefore, C.elegans has been widely used as a model organism for pursuing research in developmental biology and neurology. Using the traditional method for C.elegans analysis which is standard petri dish plates is costly and time consuming, therefore, nowadays microfluidic system which also known as ‘micro total analysis system’ is more extensively used for C.elegans research due to its characteristics which include low rate of fluid consumption and smooth process control. Beside that it can be designed easily to be compatible with each purpose. Accordingly, microfluidic system is an effective tool for analyzing C.elegans behavioral responses to various stimuli, such as temperature, electric field, and light. In this study, we used equivalent microfluidic device to perform fast and easy response analysis of thermotaxis and electrotaxis of C.elegans. Three strains where used for thermotaxis assay, i.e. wild type (N2), themotaxis defected mutants tax-4, and ttx-7, whereas for electrotaxis assay, Wild type (N2), electrotaxis defected mutant unc-6 and muscle defected mutant unc-54 were used. Finally, using the same microfluidic device, we analyzed the behavior response of C.elegance to complex stimuli using simultaneously applied electric fields and thermal gradient.