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. 2017 Jun 15;28(12):1591–1600. doi: 10.1091/mbc.E16-10-0707

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© 2017 Matsunaga et al. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). Two months after publication it is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).

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FIGURE 4: — Nematodes lacking twitchin kinase activity move faster and show a greater degree of muscle contraction. (A) Results of a swimming assay in which the number of times an animal moves back and forth in liquid are counted. The slower motility of animals with the loss-of-function allele unc-22(e66) is typical of unc-22 mutants. Both unc-22(sf21) and unc-22(e105) animals display, unexpectedly, faster motility. (B) Measurement of crawling velocity of nematodes on the surface of agar; results are normalized to the length of the animal. Results are similar to those obtained for swimming. (C) Typical results of an optogenetic experiment to measure contraction and relaxation of wild-type nematodes. Relative body area is a measure of the contraction state of body-wall muscle. (D) Optogenetic experiments on wild type and three unc-22 mutants. Compared with wild-type animals, unc-22(sf21) and unc-22(e105) worms display a greater degree of muscle contraction, whereas unc-22(e66) worms show less muscle contraction and an inability to maintain the contracted state. (E, F) Rate constants for contraction (“E” in C) and for relaxation (“F” in C) derived from fitting curves to data shown in D. (G) Relative body area at steady state, which is the average relative body area during 5 s before the relaxation (“G” in C). These numbers emphasize that unc-22(sf21) and unc-22(e105) nematodes contract more than wild type. For A, B, and E–G, n > 40; *p < 0.01, **p < 0.001, and ***p < 0.0001.