Two papers relevant to my research recently came out. One is in PNAS by a friend, Andre Brown from William Schafer’s lab at Cambridge, entitled “A dictionary of behavioral motifs reveals clusters of genes affecting Caenorhabditis elegans locomotion.” Andre collected the same sort of behavioral data I am collecting in my multi-species experiment, but he studied many mutants of C. elegans. He then applied time series motif finding algorithms to the shapes of the worms over time to identify patterns in their behavior. This pulled out a lot of interesting non-trivial “behavioral motifs” and allowed him to cluster mutants based on their effects on these motifs. I’m looking forward to applying this technique to my dataset to see how behavioral motifs change across strains and species.

The second paper is in Cell from Dan Bumbarger from Ralf Sommer’s lab, entitled “System-Wide Rewiring Underlies Behavioral Differences in Predatory and Bacterial-Feeding Nematodes.” Dan mapped the nervous system in the pharynx of Pristionchus pacificus, a satellite model to the more popular C. elegans nematode. P. pacificus is particularly interesting because it has evolved to eat a wider variety of foods than the bacteria-eating C. elegans. Dan found that while P. pacificus has the same neurons as C. elegans, the synaptic connections between them have changed considerably. A lot of work still needs to be done to understand the functional relevance of these differences, but the map is a critical first step. The study is particularly interesting for me since P. pacificus is one of the species I am testing and one of the most interesting in terms of its behavioral differences.