Kristy J. Lawton

TL;DR: A new class of microfluidic devices for C. elegans neurobiology and behavior are presented: agarose-free, micron-scale chambers and channels that allow the animals to crawl as they would on agarOSE, likely to accelerate studies of the neuronal basis of behavior in this organism.

TL;DR: A system that tracks neuron-sized fluorescent targets in real time is devised that can be used to create virtual environments by optogenetic activation of sensory neurons, or to image activity in identified neurons at high magnification, and test the long-standing hypothesis that forward and reverse locomotion are generated by distinct neuronal circuits.

TL;DR: A mathematical model of random search abstracted from the C. elegans connectome is formulated and fit to a large-scale kinematic analysis of C. nematode Caenorhabditis elegans behavior at submicron resolution, indicating that random search in the organism can be understood in terms of a neuronal flip-flop circuit involving reciprocal inhibition between two populations of stochastic neurons.

TL;DR: The results establish the necessity of this gene in motor coordination in an invertebrate model and suggest a functional homology with vertebrate FoxP2.

TL;DR: It is found that acoustic stimulation resulted in exposure time- and intensity-dependent lateral line and saccular hair cell damage that is maximal at 48–72 h post-trauma, and the feasibility of this platform to identify compounds that prevent acoustic trauma by screening a small redox library for protective compounds is demonstrated.