ArticleBMC biology2021
Caenorhabditis elegans exhibits positive gravitaxis.
Article in BMC biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 21 citations in OpenAlex.
- GravSorter: a forward-genetics tool for studying gravity response inThe Analyst · 2026Article
- Navigating Gravity: Competing Effects Result in Opposing Taxis for Different Janus Swimmers.Small (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2026Article
- Article
- The effect of common paralytic agents used for fluorescence imaging on redox tone and ATP levels in Caenorhabditis elegans.PloS one · 2024Article
- SAMPL is a high-throughput solution to study unconstrained vertical behavior in small animals.Cell reports · 2023Article
- A proprioceptive feedback circuit drivesProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Scalable Apparatus to Measure Posture and Locomotion (SAMPL): a high-throughput solution to study unconstrained vertical behavior in small animals.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- C. elegans is not a robust model organism for the magnetic sense.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Tilt in Place Microscopy: a Simple, Low-Cost Solution to Image Neural Responses to Body Rotations.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Large-Scale Gravitaxis Assay of Caenorhabditis Dauer Larvae.Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE · 2022Article
- Advances, Challenges and Future Trends of Cell-Free Transcription-Translation Biosensors.Biosensors · 2022Review
- Applications, challenges, and needs for employing synthetic biology beyond the lab.Nature communications · 2021Review
- Antagonistic Inhibitory Circuits Integrate Visual and Gravitactic Behaviors.Current biology : CB · 2020Article
- Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundGravity plays an important role in most life forms on Earth. Yet, a complete molecular understanding of sensing and responding to gravity is lacking. While there are anatomical differences among animals, there is a remarkable conservation across phylogeny at the molecular level. Caenorhabditis elegans is suitable for gene discovery approaches that may help identify molecular mechanisms of gravity sensing. It is unknown whether C. elegans can sense the direction of gravity.
resultsIn aqueous solutions, motile C. elegans nematodes align their swimming direction with the gravity vector direction while immobile worms do not. The worms orient downward regardless of whether they are suspended in a solution less dense (downward sedimentation) or denser (upward sedimentation) than themselves. Gravitaxis is minimally affected by the animals' gait but requires sensory cilia and dopamine neurotransmission, as well as motility; it does not require genes that function in the body touch response.
conclusionsGravitaxis is not mediated by passive forces such as non-uniform mass distribution or hydrodynamic effects. Rather, it is mediated by active neural processes that involve sensory cilia and dopamine. C. elegans provides a genetically tractable system to study molecular and neural mechanisms of gravity sensing.
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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.