Dimensionality of locomotor behaviors in developing C. elegans

Adult animals display robust locomotion, yet the timeline and mechanisms of how juvenile animals acquire coordinated movements and how these movements evolve during development are not well understood. Recent advances in quantitative behavioral analyses have paved the way for investigating complex natural behaviors like locomotion. In this study, we tracked the swimming and crawling behaviors of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans from postembryonic development through to adulthood. Our principal component analyses revealed that adult C. elegans swimming is low dimensional, suggesting that a small number of distinct postures, or eigenworms, account for most of the variance in the body shapes that constitute swimming behavior. Additionally, we found that crawling behavior in adult C. elegans is similarly low dimensional, corroborating previous studies. Further, our analysis revealed that swimming and crawling are distinguishable within the eigenworm space. Remarkably, young L1 larvae are..., Preparation of Worms
Wild type hermaphrodite C. elegans (N2 Bristol) worms from the CGC (Minneapolis, MN, USA) were used for all assays. The worms were maintained at 15°C on 60mm NGM agarose plates with Escherichia coli OP50 lawns as food. To obtain worms at later stages of development, synchronization procedures were carried out in which 20 gravid hermaphrodites were placed on seeded NGM plates. After one hour, all worms were subsequently removed, leaving only eggs on the plates which were immediately put into a 20° incubator. After 21 hours of incubator growth time for late L1s, 29 hours for L2s, 42 hours for L3s, 50 hours for L4s, and 65 hours for adult worms, the synchronized animals were subjected to assays. Young L1 recently hatched animals were collected by transferring 50 gravid hermaphrodites to a seeded plate 24 hours before the experimental assay. On the day of the experiment, the plate with gravid hermaphrodites and laid eggs was washed with M9 buffer until all animals and b..., , # Data from: Dimensionality of locomotor behaviors in developing C. elegans

## Description of the data and file structure

Data are organized into subfolders according to their locomotion type and developmental stage. Each .txt file contains tracking of a single worm with the first column showing timestamps and the next 10 columns showing the animal curvature in radians for that row. Files are named by date_strain_age_gait_file# or date_strain_age_gait_file#_worm# if there was more than one worm in a given assay. One adult swimming to crawling transition assay was included in this study for which there is one .txt file for. 

## Code/Software

Custom written Python scripts to reproduce figures will be made publicly available at the time of publication.