ABOVE: C. elegans inside microfluidic chambers
DANIEL GONZALES AND BO FAN
Typically, the worm Caenorhabditis elegans falls asleep after it experiences stress or hours of swimming. In a recent study, scientists observed another sleep trigger: being confined to a microfluidic chamber. As such devices are widely used to analyze different worm behaviors, the authors caution that the sleep induction could interfere with data interpretation. The results were published November 6 in Nature Communications.
“In our field, microfluidic chambers have become very commonly used, and they are valuable tools for precise environmental control and for neural imaging . . . but what this study highlights is that we are significantly impacting the physiology and behavior of these animals by confining them in such a way,” says Cheryl Van Buskirk, a geneticist at California State University in Northridge. Van Buskirk studies sleep and stress response in worms, but she was not involved in ...
