Locomotion of C. elegans: A Piecewise-Harmonic Curvature Representation of Nematode Behavior

Caenorhabditis elegans, a free-living soil nematode, displays a rich variety of body shapes and trajectories during its undulatory locomotion in complex environments. Here we show that the individual body postures and entire trails of C. elegans have a simple analytical description in curvature representation. Our model is based on the assumption that the curvature wave is generated in the head segment of the worm body and propagates backwards. We have found that a simple harmonic function for the curvature can capture multiple worm shapes during the undulatory movement. The worm body trajectories can be well represented in terms of piecewise sinusoidal curvature with abrupt changes in amplitude, wavevector, and phase.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  PLoS ONE

• Publication date

  2012-07-06

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0040121PMID 22792224PMCID 3391229
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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