Abstract
Animals' perception and behavior involve integration of multiple sensory modalities. Caenorhabditis elegans is a useful model for studying multimodal sensory integration, as it has well‐characterized neuronal circuits in a relatively simple nervous system. However, most studies based on functional imaging have only been conducted on single modal stimuli, because well‐controlled multimodal experiments for C. elegans are technically difficult. For instance, no single systems currently deliver precise stimuli with spatial, temporal, and intensity control, despite prior hypotheses that interneurons do integrate these sensory inputs to control behavior. Here, a microfluidic platform that can easily deliver spatially and temporally controlled combination stimuli to C. elegans is presented. With this platform, both sensory and interneuron activity is measured in response to mechanical and chemical stimulations in a quantitative and high‐throughput manner. It is found that the activity of command interneuron PVC can be modulated by prior stimulation both within the same and across different modalities. The roles of monoaminergic and peptidergic signaling are further examined on the process of multimodal integration through PVC activity. The approach exemplified here is envisioned to be broadly applicable in different contexts to elucidate underlying mechanisms and identify genes affecting multisensory integration.
Highlights
Animals’ perception and behavior involve integration of multiple sensory cues from multiple modalities allows animals to better extract relevant informodalities
It is known that C. elegans can respond to a variety of sensory cues, such as smell, taste, touch, oxygen level, and temperature.[14,15,16,17]
We developed a monolithic microfluidic platform in which we can deliver chemical and mechanical stimulations to specific spatial locations of a worm body (Figure 1B,C; Figure S1, Supporting Information; see the Experimental Section for details)
Summary
Because we use pneumatic controls, both the chemical and the mechanical stimuli have high temporal precision, and can be delivered in arbitrary patterns These robust operations allow the studies on how the interneurons integrate the different signals from each sensory input, as well as how prior experience modulates perception. We confirmed that PVC interneurons do not show any response to buffer-to-buffer changes, which is not surprising as the sensory neurons (e.g., ASH) are not stimulated on our chip during buffer-to-buffer switch (Figure S4, Supporting Information). PVC is directly connected to six gentle touch neurons through either chemical synapse or gap junctions; AVA is only indirectly connected to those touch neurons, except PLML/R
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