ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2016
Hierarchical compression of Caenorhabditis elegans locomotion reveals phenotypic differences in the organization of behaviour.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- A framework for analyzing globaleLife · 2026Article
- Article
- Measuring hierarchical structure across hominid percussive tool-use sequences.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Hierarchical behavior control by a single class of interneurons.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A Markovian dynamics forProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A tonically active master neuron modulates mutually exclusive motor states at two timescales.Science advances · 2024Article
- Caenorhabditis elegans foraging patterns follow a simple rule of thumb.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Social behavioral profiling by unsupervised deep learning reveals a stimulative effect of dopamine D3 agonists on zebrafish sociality.Cell reports methods · 2023Article
- Nematode gene annotation by machine-learning-assisted proteotranscriptomics enables proteome-wide evolutionary analysis.Genome research · 2023Article
- Review
- Discovering sparse control strategies in neural activity.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Deep learning for robust and flexible tracking in behavioral studies for C. elegans.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Megapixel camera arrays enable high-resolution animal tracking in multiwell plates.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Long-range sequential dependencies precede complex syntactic production in language acquisition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A lexical approach for identifying behavioural action sequences.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Behavioral fingerprints predict insecticide and anthelmintic mode of action.Molecular systems biology · 2021Article
- Article
- Article
- Screening by changes in stereotypical behavior during cell motility.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Adaptive, locally linear models of complex dynamics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Regularities in animal behaviour offer insights into the underlying organizational and functional principles of nervous systems and automated tracking provides the opportunity to extract features of behaviour directly from large-scale video data. Yet how to effectively analyse such behavioural data remains an open question. Here, we explore whether a minimum description length principle can be exploited to identify meaningful behaviours and phenotypes. We apply a dictionary compression algorithm to behavioural sequences from the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans freely crawling on an agar plate both with and without food and during chemotaxis. We find that the motifs identified by the compression algorithm are rare but relevant for comparisons between worms in different environments, suggesting that hierarchical compression can be a useful step in behaviour analysis. We also use compressibility as a new quantitative phenotype and find that the behaviour of wild-isolated strains of C. elegans is more compressible than that of the laboratory strain N2 as well as the majority of mutant strains examined. Importantly, in distinction to more conventional phenotypes such as overall motor activity or aggregation behaviour, the increased compressibility of wild isolates is not explained by the loss of function of the gene npr-1, which suggests that erratic locomotion is a laboratory-derived trait with a novel genetic basis. Because hierarchical compression can be applied to any sequence, we anticipate that compressibility can offer insights into the organization of behaviour in other animals including humans.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.