Targeted thermal stimulation and high-content phenotyping reveal that the C. elegans escape response integrates current behavioral state and past experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ability to avoid harmful or potentially harmful stimuli can help an organism escape predators and injury, and certain avoidance mechanisms are conserved across the animal kingdom. However, how the need to avoid an imminent threat is balanced with current behavior and modified by past experience is not well understood. In this work we focused on rapidly increasing temperature, a signal that triggers an escape response in a variety of animals, including the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. We have developed a noxious thermal response assay using an infrared laser that can be automatically controlled and targeted in order to investigate how C. elegans responds to noxious heat over long timescales and to repeated stimuli in various behavioral and sensory contexts. High-content phenotyping of behavior in individual animals revealed that the C. elegans escape response is multidimensional, with some features that extend for several minutes, and can be modulated by (i) stimulus amplitude; (ii) other sensory inputs, such as food context; (iii) long and short-term thermal experience; and (iv) the animal's current behavioral state.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".