Institute of Clinical Sciences, Imperial College London, London, UK.
MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, London, UK.
Commun Biol. 2022 Mar 23;5(1):253. doi: 10.1038/s42003-022-03206-1.
Tracking small laboratory animals such as flies, fish, and worms is used for phenotyping in neuroscience, genetics, disease modelling, and drug discovery. An imaging system with sufficient throughput and spatiotemporal resolution would be capable of imaging a large number of animals, estimating their pose, and quantifying detailed behavioural differences at a scale where hundreds of treatments could be tested simultaneously. Here we report an array of six 12-megapixel cameras that record all the wells of a 96-well plate with sufficient resolution to estimate the pose of C. elegans worms and to extract high-dimensional phenotypic fingerprints. We use the system to study behavioural variability across wild isolates, the sensitisation of worms to repeated blue light stimulation, the phenotypes of worm disease models, and worms' behavioural responses to drug treatment. Because the system is compatible with standard multiwell plates, it makes computational ethological approaches accessible in existing high-throughput pipelines.
跟踪小型实验动物，如苍蝇、鱼类和蠕虫，可用于神经科学、遗传学、疾病建模和药物发现中的表型分析。一个具有足够的吞吐量和时空分辨率的成像系统能够对大量的动物进行成像，估计它们的姿势，并在可以同时测试数百种处理方法的尺度上量化详细的行为差异。在这里，我们报告了一个由六个 1200 万像素的相机组成的阵列，它们可以以足够的分辨率记录一个 96 孔板的所有孔，以估计秀丽隐杆线虫的姿势，并提取高维表型指纹。我们使用该系统来研究野生分离株之间的行为变异性、线虫对重复蓝光刺激的敏感性、线虫疾病模型的表型以及线虫对药物治疗的行为反应。由于该系统与标准的多孔板兼容，因此它使计算行为学方法在现有的高通量管道中变得可行。
