Figure 3.

Analysis of worm velocity and directional persistence. (A) Worm tracks were analyzed by measuring the displacement >3-s intervals, and the resultant velocities from five animals were compiled and plotted as histograms. The mean velocities and standard deviations are shown in Table 1. UNC-104 wild-type animals show a broad range of velocities and only occasional pauses, whereas unc-104 and ΔPH animals spend most of their time in a very slow moving state (left bin of the histogram). (B) The directionality of movement of single worms was analyzed in this polar plot. The worm starts at the center of the plot (time 0, angle arbitrarily set at 0° parallel to the long axis of the animal) and at each second, the angle in which the worm is moving is plotted. The unc-104 animals do not show persistent motion, as indicated by the spread of points throughout the polar plot; similar results are true for UNC-104_ΔPH–expressing animals. On the other hand, wt UNC-104, UNC-104_R1496A, and UNC-104_KK1463/4AA–expressing animals often exhibited persistent motion, but the later sometimes showed frequent backwards and forwards motion. Additional directionality plots are found in Supplementary Figure 1.