Hello everyone,
Is there any automatic program to measure C. elegans pharyngeal pumping using captured video files?. We are trying to measure the feeding rate in a large set of worms. Any other suggestions to measure feeding efficiently is highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance for your time and help.
Durai
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I recommend you check out the Matlab routines for automated particle tracking here: ParthasarathyLab: Particle Tracking
You should be able to get information about time-dependent changes in the shape as well as size of each particle. The machine can be instructed to recognize particles based on pixel value - so this can work only if the pharynx is specifically lit up with a fluorescent protein.
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Another idea, just for assessing food uptake: just pulse the worms (in liquid culture) with some fluorescently or otherwise labeled food, and measure the signal in guts at subsequent time point.
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PPS. From the horse’s mouth (actually from an email from R Parasarathy): Possibly more useful: software we wrote for analyzing the regular contractions of zebrafish gut motility. The paper (open version): https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/169979v1 , and all the (MATLAB) code is available here: GitHub - rplab/Ganz-Baker-Image-Velocimetry-Analysis: A set of Matlab functions for analyzing image velocimetry data on biological motility .