Figure 1. Construction and use of low cost Caenorhabditis elegans tracking system: A) Assembly of the worm tracker takes under one hour (1-14). See step by step instructions below. B) Sample frame from movie obtained with the tracker. C) Movie processing with the wrMTrck plugin for ImageJ. We filmed and compared swimming in day 1 adult wild-type (N2) and
unc-31(
e928) mutants to illustrate the capability of the tracking system. Four swimming assays with eight animals each were performed for each strain. D) The synaptic mutant
unc-31(
e928) has significant impairments in swimming frequency and normalized (to body length) velocity (E) compared to N2 worms. ** p<0.001, two-tailed t-test.