Chapter 14 - Micro systems for the study of behavioral responses of C. elegans to various physical and chemical stimuli

Abstract

C. elegans is an attractive model organism, especially for neural system studies as it is the simplest organism with a nervous system. Moreover, the worm has interesting behavioral responses to various external physical and chemical stimuli. In the past few decades, numerous studies have been performed on the behavioral response of C. elegans using a micro system platform. Hence, the results of these studies found several applications such as drug screening. In this chapter, we describe various micro systems for the analysis of the behavioral responses of C. elegans to various external stimuli. However, we mainly focus on thermotaxis in micro systems. We divided this chapter into two major parts. In the first part, we briefly discuss the behavioral responses of C. elegans to various physical and chemical stimuli. In the second part, we summarize the microfluidic platform used for the behavioral response analysis of C. elegans.