Aerotaxis Assay in to Study Behavioral Plasticity.

shows robust and reproducible behavioral responses to oxygen. Specifically, worms prefer O levels of 5-10% and avoid too high or too low O . Their O preference is not fixed but shows plasticity depending on experience, context, or genetic background. We recently showed that this experience-dependent plasticity declines with age, providing a useful behavioral readout for studying the mechanisms of age-related decline of neural plasticity. Here, we describe a technique to visualize behavioral O preference and its plasticity in , by creating spatial gradients of [O ] in a microfluidic polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) chamber and recording the resulting spatial distribution of the animals.