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Recordings of $\textit{Caenorhabditis elegans}$ locomotor behaviour following targeted ablation of single motorneurons

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Chew, Yee Lian 
Walker, Denise S 
Towlson, Emma K 
Vértes, Petra E 
Yan, Gang 

Abstract

Lesioning studies have provided important insight into the functions of brain regions in humans and other animals. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, with a small nervous system of 302 identified neurons, it is possible to generate lesions with single cell resolution and infer the roles of individual neurons in behaviour. Here we present a dataset of ~300 video recordings representing the locomotor behaviour of animals carrying single-cell ablations of 5 different motorneurons. Each file includes a raw video of approximately 27,000 frames; each frame has also been segmented to yield the position, contour, and body curvature of the tracked animal. These recordings can be further analysed using publicly-available software to extract features relevant to behavioural phenotypes. This dataset therefore represents a useful resource for probing the neural basis of behaviour in C. elegans, a resource we hope to augment in the future with ablation recordings for additional neurons.

Description

Keywords

Animals, Caenorhabditis elegans, Locomotion, Motor Neurons

Journal Title

Scientific Data

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2052-4463
2052-4463

Volume Title

4

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Sponsorship
Medical Research Council (MR/K020706/1)
We are grateful to L. Grundy, A. Brown and E. Yemini for help with analysis of tracking data, and V. Butler and the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center (funded by NIH Office of Research Infrastructure Programs P40 OD010440), for C. elegans strains. This work is supported by MRC grant number MC-A023-5PB91; Wellcome Trust grant number WT103784MA; John Templeton Foundation: Mathematical and Physical Sciences grant number PFI-777; and European Commission grant number 255 641191 (CIMPLEX). P.E.V. is supported by the Medical Research Council grant number 257 MR/K020706/1. Y.L.C. is supported by an EMBO Long Term Fellowship.