Effect of potassium chloride concentration on the sinusoidal movements of the wild-type (N2) and mutant (unc-2 VC854) strains of Caenorhabditis elegans

Abstract

The objective of our study was to measure the chemotaxis response of the wild type (N2) and mutant (unc-2 VC854) strains of C. elegans at three different potassium chloride (KCl) buffer concentrations. The experiment was performed by transferring C. elegans, to an agar plate with 20μL of KCl treatment buffer and recording their sinusoidal head movements after a 10 second acclimatization period. We counted the number of sinusoidal head movements of the C. elegans in the videos.  We then performed a two-way ANOVA analysis and found that the interaction between the type of strain and the response to the KCl concentration level had a p value of 0.08. This indicated that the difference in chemotaxis response to increasing KCl concentration levels between the wild-type (WT) and the mutant strains of C. elegans was not significant. We observed no trend in the chemotaxis response of C. elegans at increasing KCl concentrations. We observed a trend of higher chemotaxis response rate in WT as compared to mutant. As for the effect of mutation on response to increasing KCl concentration, we observed no trend for the WT; however, there was a trend of increasing chemotaxis response with increasing KCl for the mutant.