OpenWorm Journal Club: Movie magic with elegant worms
Channel: OpenWorm
Date: 2013-08-16

OpenWorm Journal Club: Movie magic with elegant worms

Remember the first time you went to the movies?  The power, the drama, the special effects!  While the world has not yet created a blockbuster based on c. elegans worms with super powers, the amazing folks at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK have created the next best thing.  Watch out, Man of Steel!

Using low-cost automated tracking microscopes, they have generated a behavioral database for 305 Caenorhabditis elegans strains, including 76 mutants with no previously described phenotype. The growing database currently consists of 9,203 short videos segmented to extract behavior and morphology features and includes summary statistics for 702 measures with statistical comparisons to wild-type controls.

You can view the magic online via YouTube on the "C. elegans Behavioural Database" channel  (http://www.youtube.com/user/wormbehavior). The data are also available online (http://wormbehavior.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/).  Be sure to check out Worm Tracker 2.0 (WT2) too. The hardware guide and free software are available at: http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/wormtracker/.

Please join Ev Yemini as he discusses his recent article in Nature Methods (including building the tracking and analysis software) and learn more about this amazing resource. Article here: http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmeth.2560.html