[
International Worm Meeting,
2021]
The most standard behavioural assay involves imaging worms crawling on NGM agar. Recent developments in hardware and software increase the throughput of these experiments by running multiple experimental replicates in parallel and by automating post-acquisition worm tracking and feature extraction. We imaged and analysed the crawling behaviour of 197 C. elegans wild isolates in the presence of the OP50 food source, and used genome-wide association (GWA) analyses to identify several quantitative trait loci that are linked to specific behavioural features. Additionally, we explored multiple behavioural assays involving more "challenging" environments, and found that these assays reveal more pronounced behavioural differences at the species level (between C. elegans, C. briggsae, and C. tropicalis) compared to the standard crawling assay. We plan to apply these behavioural assays to hundreds of wild isolates from the three species, in order to identify natural genetic variants that underlie heritable behavioural traits across the Caenorhabiditis genus.