Role of neuropeptide FLP-15 and its receptor NPR-3 in regulating locomotion during foraging in Caenorhabditis elegans

Abstract

Foraging for food is an important behavior that allows for normal life and well-being in many animals. In Caenorhabditis elegans it is an amalgam of different types of locomotory movements that include forward crawls, turns and reversals. When C. elegans are transferred from well-fed conditions to a plate without food, they explore the arena in a localised manner with a combination of reorientations (reversals and omega turns) executed frequently. However, the cumulative frequency of these reorientations decreases temporally in off-food conditions to release the local search behavior and ensure global search of the arena. Defects in reorientations and/or the body wave parameters like the wavelength and amplitude of the sinusoidal waves result in inefficient exploration of the environment. This exploration is a sustained behaviour and is reported to be mediated by chemosensory and mechanosensory neurons in coordination with the metabolic status of the organism, but the mechanism is poorly understood. Therefore, in this context, the non-wired neuropeptidergic circuit that is known to regulate sustained behaviors by virtue of its characteristic signaling mechanism, is an interesting pathway to investigate. My thesis aims at elucidating the neuropeptidergic signaling that modulates the behavioral switch from local search to the global search. We have also delved into exploring how these neuropeptides regulate the amplitude of body bends during locomotion to ensure effective exploration of the environment during foraging