Electric Egg-Laying: Effect of Electric Field in a Microchannel on C. elegans Egg-Laying Behavior

• Published in: bioRxiv
• Main Authors: Youssef, Khaled, Archonta, Daphne, Kubiseski, Terrance J, Tandon, Anurag, Rezai, Pouya
• Format: Paper
• Language: English
• Published: Cold Spring Harbor Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 01.09.2020
• Subjects: Aging; Body length; Calcium (intracellular); Calcium imaging; Calcium signalling; Egg laying; Electric fields; Hermaphrodites; Muscles; Serotonin; Vulva
• DOI: 10.1101/2020.09.01.276097

ABSTRACT In this paper, the novel effect of electric field (EF) on adult C. elegans egg-laying in a microchannel is discovered and correlated with neural and muscular activities. The quantitative effects of worm aging and EF strength, direction, and exposure duration on egg-laying is studied phenotypically using egg-count, body length, head movement, and transient neuronal activity readouts. Electric egg-laying rate increases significantly when worms face the anode and the response is EF-dependent, i.e. stronger (6V/cm) and longer EF (40s) exposure result in a shorter egg laying response duration. Worm aging significantly deteriorates the electric egg-laying behaviour with 88% decrease in the egg-count from Day-1 to Day-4 post young-adult stage. Fluorescent imaging of intracellular calcium dynamics in the main parts of the egg-laying neural circuit demonstrate the involvement and sensitivity of the serotonergic hermaphrodite specific neurons (HSNs), vulva muscles, and ventral cord neurons to the EF. HSN mutation also results in a reduced rate of electric egg-laying allowing the use of this technique for cellular screening and mapping of the neural basis of electrosensation in C. elegans. This novel assay can be parallelized and performed in a high-throughput manner for drug and gene screening applications. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.