"Information processing and behavioural phenotyping in C. elegans"

Submitted by gmalone on Fri, 09/12/2011 - 12:14

Date:
24 Jan 2011, 16:00 - 17:00

Elucidating the mechanisms by which nervous systems process
information and generate behaviour is among the fundamental problems
of biology. Ultimately, it is desirable to understand these processes
at the most basic level, that of molecules and cells. We are
investigating these questions using the nematode Caenorhabditis
elegans, which has an anatomically simple and well-defined nervous
system and is tractable to molecular and classical genetic analysis.
Using molecular genetics and in vivo optical neuroimaging, we are
investigating how the activities of individual neurons correlate with
behaviour and using this information to understand basic principles of
sensory transduction and computation by neural microcircuits.

Understanding the relationship between genes, neurons and behaviour
also requires the development of methods for the rapid and consistent
quantitation of behavioural phenotypes. We have developed machine
vision approaches to automate the collection of video image data from
C. elegans mutants and apply unsupervised approaches to analysing
behavioural patterns. We are using these approaches to quantify the
similarities of C. elegans mutant phenotypes and to investigate the
natural clustering of mutant behavioral patterns. Ultimately, we hope
to use these methods to generate a large-scale phenotypic database for
C. elegans, which should make it possible to identify groups of
mutants neuronal ablations and pharmacological treatments that have
similar effects on behaviour or development, and therefore infer
involvement in a common biological function.