We would appreciate to receive suggestions about the measurement of C. elegans speed on plates, with or without additional software.
Many Thanks
You may try “worm tracker” in Goodman lab, Stanford U. I hope this helps.
I would also second the recommendation for worm tracker, developed by Daniel Ramot and Miriam Goodman, see
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0002208
for their excellent paper describing the tracker, which can itself be downloaded from the Goodman lab website at Stanford:
http://wormsense.stanford.edu/tracker/
Although the tracker is graciously provided for no expense, it requires the use of MATLAB with at least one toolbox which is moderately expensive if you are not already using it in the lab. Of course, MATLAB is highly useful for many things and likely worth the investment. The tracker is easy to set up and use and provides large amounts of useful data quite quickly, being designed for use with multiple worms on the same plate.
Alas, as I understand it, Daniel Ramot has graduated and no further support can be provided for the program, maybe someone with some coding expertise would like to pick it up and enhance it even further. Finally, it is not necessary to use the camera they recommend in the paper (though obviously it is a good one), I think there are less costly alternatives out there that would also work.
Hope this helps and good luck!
The wormtracker should work for many users. Daniel Ramot has indeed graduated and was the Goodman Lab MATLAB expert. If you can find a local MATLAB expert, it should be straightforward to get the tracker working.
If there are any MATLAB-enabled worm researchers out there who have the desire and ability to improve/modify the tracker code, we also set-up an open-source site on sourceforge for exchanging code extensions: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wormtracker. I encourage any and all of you to consider a contribution…
-All the best,
Miriam Goodman, Stanford
Hi Speedsters,
For the truly poor, I have found that you can also use the free plug in called MTrack2 for the open source ImageJ image analysis software supported by NIH. The Vale lab at UCSF originally developed this plugin to track subcellular particles. I used it to track groups of individual worms to obtain a quick measurement of average instantaneous speed for different mutants. The tracking algorithm is similar to Ramot’s MATLAB-based system by subtracting images on subsequent frames to help detect objects. This plugin does not have all of the convenient bells and whistles included in Ramot’s system (disclaimer – I have used Ramot’s system and it works very well with the bonus of having automated detection of certain events like pirouettes!!), but this simple plugin can get you the raw x, y data that you can process in your favorite analysis system. We set up a $100 student video/microscope with a cheap laptop and used this free software to track worms in a high school class. The nice thing about ImageJ is that you can set it up on every computer without paying additional licensing fees.
imagej
http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/
Mtr
Good luck! - Jon Pierce-Shimomura