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Autonomous screening of C. elegans identifies genes implicated in synaptogenesis

Nature Methods volume 9, pages 977–980 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

Morphometric studies in multicellular organisms are generally performed manually because of the complexity of multidimensional features and lack of appropriate tools for handling these organisms. Here we present an integrated system that identifies and sorts Caenorhabditis elegans mutants with altered subcellular traits in real time without human intervention. We performed self-directed screens 100 times faster than manual screens and identified both genes and phenotypic classes involved in synapse formation.

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Figure 1: Integrated system for autonomous screening of C. elegans expressing fluorescent reporters.
Figure 2: Autonomous screens for C. elegans mutants with altered synaptic patterns.

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Acknowledgements

We thank funding from the US National Institutes of Health, US National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

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Author notes

  1. Matthew M Crane

    Present address: Present address: SynthSys, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.,

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Interdisciplinary Program in Bioengineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Matthew M Crane, Jeffrey N Stirman & Hang Lu

  2. School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Jeffrey N Stirman & Hang Lu

  3. Department of Biology, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University, USA, California

    Chan-Yen Ou, Peri T Kurshan & Kang Shen

  4. School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    James M Rehg

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  1. Matthew M Crane
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  7. Hang Lu
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Contributions

M.M.C. wrote the software, designed the microfluidic device and performed the screens. M.M.C. and J.N.S. designed and built the external system components. C.-Y.O. performed the complementation tests. P.T.K. performed the mapping and provided valuable reagents. M.M.C., J.N.S., J.M.R., K.S. and H.L. designed the experiments and prepared the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hang Lu.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–9, Supplementary Tables 1 and 2 and Supplementary Notes 1–4 (PDF 779 kb)

Supplementary Software

Supplementary Software (ZIP 274 kb)

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Crane, M., Stirman, J., Ou, CY. et al. Autonomous screening of C. elegans identifies genes implicated in synaptogenesis. Nat Methods 9, 977–980 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2141

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