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  • Review Article
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Digging deeper: methodologies for high-content phenotyping in Caenorhabditis elegans

Lab Animal volume 48, pages 207–216 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Deep phenotyping is an emerging conceptual paradigm and experimental approach aimed at measuring and linking many aspects of a phenotype to understand its underlying biology. To date, deep phenotyping has been applied mostly in cultured cells and used less in multicellular organisms. However, in the past decade, it has increasingly been recognized that deep phenotyping could lead to a better understanding of how genetics, environment and stochasticity affect the development, physiology and behavior of an organism. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is an invaluable model system for studying how genes affect a phenotypic trait, and new technologies have taken advantage of the worm’s physical attributes to increase the throughput and informational content of experiments. Coupling of these technical advancements with computational and analytical tools has enabled a boom in deep-phenotyping studies of C. elegans. In this Review, we highlight how these new technologies and tools are digging into the biological origins of complex, multidimensional phenotypes.

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Fig. 1: Microfluidics enables high-throughput experimentation in C. elegans.
Fig. 2: Deep phenotyping produces informationally rich datasets.
Fig. 3: Behavioral deep phenotyping of worms using automated trackers.

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Acknowledgements

We thank K.E. Bates, D.A. Porto and T. Rouse for their suggestions on relevant literature, and the US National Institutes of Health (grants AG056436, DC015652, NS096581, GM088333, EB021676, EB020424 and GM10896) and National Science Foundation (grants 1707401 and 1764406) for funding support.

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Dhaval S. Patel and Nan Xu.

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

    Dhaval S. Patel, Nan Xu & Hang Lu

  2. The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Nan Xu

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Patel, D.S., Xu, N. & Lu, H. Digging deeper: methodologies for high-content phenotyping in Caenorhabditis elegans. Lab Anim 48, 207–216 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41684-019-0326-6

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