WormGazer™ Video: Reproductive Toxicity of Etoxazole in C. elegans

The technology developed by Magnitude Biosciences images the movement of worms on several petri dishes at once. On the right you can see a control dish with a single C. elegans worm and another with a worm exposed to the acaricide etoxazole. The white tracks show the movement of the worms, that are the progeny of the original animal.

You will see that in the presence of etoxazole, there are far fewer worms. The graph on the left shows the increase in worm population over time as the experiment progresses. Increasing doses of etoxazole reduce the population size. The bar graph compares the area under the curves to give a quantitative measure of reproductive toxicity. This dataset can be further analysed to measure the rate of population growth and reveal delays in the onset of egg-laying.