Awardee: Elizabeth Glater, associate professor of neuroscience, examines how genes and environment modify the nervous system to produce different behaviors. She works with the nematode C. elegans which has many genes that are similar to human genes and a well-characterized nervous system of only 302 neurons.
The Hahn teaching grant will support the development of a new lab module for her upper-level neuroscience course, Genes and Behavior. In this module, students will learn how to analyze C. elegans movement using computer code written by members of the C. elegans research community.
Title: Learning how to do quantitative analysis of the behavior of the nematode C. elegans
Goal: The goal of Elizabeth’s project is to provide students with experience in quantifying the movement of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, an organism with a well-characterized nervous system that provides insight about how nervous system produces behavior. She also aims to help students enhance their skills in analyzing data using computational methods. Students will be given the opportunity to record videos of C. elegans movement and use existing Matlab code, named MultiWormTracker (Pokala and Flavell 2022), to analyze and quantify their behavior. Students will also learn to create meaningful data visualizations using Python.
Project Outcomes: Although each step of crafting a new lab module for the upper-level Genes and Behavior neuroscience course invariably presented obstacles, Professor Glater and her collaborators, ITS’s own Andrew Wilson and Dr. Joseph Beardslee, Instrumentation Specialist in the Chemistry Department, persevered. Wilson and others at ITS managed to bypass security features impeding MultiWormTracker code from working on Seaver South computers, as well as compressing recorded movies to the required format. On his end, Dr. Beardslee was able to design an effective system for recording worm videos. The process entailed searching for reasonably priced cameras with high enough resolution to image the very small 1mm word and custom designing different 3D-printed holders for the cameras and plates of worms. The team, which now includes Dylan Blackett ‘24 and Catie Kaneshiro ’24, laboratory teaching assistants for the Genes and Behavior class, as well as Nancy Rodriguez from ITS, is confident the module will be fully realized in late February.