RRC ID 45774
著者 Koren Y, Sznitman R, Arratia PE, Carls C, Krajacic P, Brown AE, Sznitman J.
タイトル Model-independent phenotyping of C. elegans locomotion using scale-invariant feature transform.
ジャーナル PLoS One
Abstract To uncover the genetic basis of behavioral traits in the model organism C. elegans, a common strategy is to study locomotion defects in mutants. Despite efforts to introduce (semi-)automated phenotyping strategies, current methods overwhelmingly depend on worm-specific features that must be hand-crafted and as such are not generalizable for phenotyping motility in other animal models. Hence, there is an ongoing need for robust algorithms that can automatically analyze and classify motility phenotypes quantitatively. To this end, we have developed a fully-automated approach to characterize C. elegans' phenotypes that does not require the definition of nematode-specific features. Rather, we make use of the popular computer vision Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) from which we construct histograms of commonly-observed SIFT features to represent nematode motility. We first evaluated our method on a synthetic dataset simulating a range of nematode crawling gaits. Next, we evaluated our algorithm on two distinct datasets of crawling C. elegans with mutants affecting neuromuscular structure and function. Not only is our algorithm able to detect differences between strains, results capture similarities in locomotory phenotypes that lead to clustering that is consistent with expectations based on genetic relationships. Our proposed approach generalizes directly and should be applicable to other animal models. Such applicability holds promise for computational ethology as more groups collect high-resolution image data of animal behavior.
巻・号 10(3)
ページ e0122326
公開日 2015-1-1
DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0122326
PII PONE-D-14-53642
PMID 25816290
PMC PMC4376858
MeSH Algorithms Animals Biomechanical Phenomena Caenorhabditis elegans / physiology* Locomotion / physiology* Models, Animal Phenotype*
IF 2.74
引用数 5
WOS 分野 GENETICS & HEREDITY
リソース情報
線虫 tm3085 tm3092