Abstract

Sometimes the best way to study a drug or microbe is just to see what it does to an animal. However, measuring and analysing whole-animal responses can be a major bottleneck. We have developed megapixel camera arrays to record all the wells of 96-well plates with enough resolution for detailed tracking. We use this approach to measure behavioural profiles of C. elegans in 10k conditions per day. Computational ethology at this scale opens new directions in disease modelling and drug screening. I will discuss our work using this approach to find neuroactive natural products, predict the mode of action of insecticides from behaviour, and to model dozens of genetic diseases.