Megapixel camera arrays enable high-resolution animal tracking in multiwell plates
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Tracking small laboratory animals such as flies, fish, and worms is used for phenotyping in neuroscience, genetics, disease modelling, and drug discovery. An imaging system with sufficient throughput and spatiotemporal resolution would be capable of imaging a large number of animals, estimating their pose, and quantifying detailed behavioural differences at a scale where hundreds of treatments could be tested simultaneously. Here we report an array of six 12-megapixel cameras that record all the wells of a 96-well plate with sufficient resolution to estimate the pose of C. elegans worms and to extract high-dimensional phenotypic fingerprints. We use the system to study behavioural variability across wild isolates, the sensitisation of worms to repeated blue light stimulation, the phenotypes of worm disease models, and worms’ behavioural responses to drug treatment. Because the system is compatible with standard multiwell plates, it makes computational ethological approaches accessible in existing high-throughput pipelines.
Date Issued
2022-03-23
Date Acceptance
2022-03-01
Citation
Communications Biology, 2022, 5
ISSN
2399-3642
Publisher
Nature Research
Journal / Book Title
Communications Biology
Volume
5
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing,
adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give
appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party
material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless
indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the
article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory
regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from
the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.
Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing,
adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give
appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party
material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless
indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the
article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory
regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from
the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Sponsor
European Research Council
Identifier
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03206-1
Grant Number
ERC-STG-2016-714853
Subjects
Science & Technology
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
Biology
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Life Sciences & Biomedicine - Other Topics
Science & Technology - Other Topics
C. ELEGANS
BEHAVIOR
MODEL
PHENOTYPES
SELECTION
ETHOLOGY
Animals
Caenorhabditis elegans
Light
Phenotype
Animals
Caenorhabditis elegans
Phenotype
Light
Publication Status
Published