Publications referencing our products
Research articles and preprints documenting the use of Tau Scientific Instruments imaging and behavioral experimentation systems, presented chronologically.
1. Pribadi A, Rieger MA, Rosales K, Reddy KC, Chalasani SH. (2023). Dopamine signaling regulates predator-driven changes in Caenorhabditis elegans’ egg laying behavior. eLife, 12, e83957.
Equipment and application: The WormWatcher Imaging Station was used for automated fluorescence imaging of C. elegans exposed to predators on solid NGM agar in a custom 12-arena configuration. Images collected every 4 minutes for 20 hours enabled tracking of worm locations relative to bacterial lawns, yielding time-resolved distances from the food-lawn boundary and measurements of predator-induced avoidance behavior.
View publication | Related doctoral thesis
2. Bastien BL, Cowen MH, Hart MP. (2023). Distinct neurexin isoforms cooperate to initiate and maintain foraging activity. Translational Psychiatry, 13, 367.
Equipment and application: The WormWatcher Imaging Station imaged individual adult C. elegans in 48-well WorMotel devices containing solid NGM agar, with or without bacterial food and with selected octopamine treatments. Images acquired every 10 seconds for 8 hours were analyzed by frame subtraction to quantify movement as pixel displacement per worm per hour, allowing comparison of foraging responses across genotypes and experimental conditions.
3. Cowen MH, Raizen DM, Hart MP. (2024). Structural neuroplasticity after sleep loss modifies behavior and requires neurexin and neuroligin. iScience, 27(4), 109477.
Equipment and application: The WormWatcher Imaging Station recorded individual male C. elegans in agar-filled WorMotel wells at 10-second intervals for 16 hours, generating movement-based activity and quiescence measurements, including time spent quiescent during developmental molts. Tau-developed WormWatcher vibration hardware was also used to deliver 1-second mechanical stimuli every 10 minutes for 6 hours to disrupt developmental sleep, after which neuronal morphology and behavior were assessed.
4. Bastien BL, Haury WR, Smisko WR, Hart MP. (2024). nlr-1/CNTNAP regulates dopamine circuit structure and foraging behaviors in C. elegans. Communications Biology, 7, 1248.
Equipment and application: The WormWatcher Imaging Station was used with two assay formats: individual worms crawling on solid agar in 48-well WorMotels, imaged every 10 seconds for 8 hours, and populations of worms swimming in M9 buffer containing pharmacological compounds in 96-well plates, imaged for 8–9 hours. Tau-developed analysis software quantified movement from changes in image pixels, generating individual hourly activity measurements and well-level population activity normalized to vehicle controls for drug-response comparisons.
5. Cowen MH, Haskell D, Zoga K, Reddy KC, Chalasani SH, Hart MP. (2024). Conserved autism-associated genes tune social feeding behavior in C. elegans. Nature Communications, 15, 9301.
Equipment and application: A WormWatcher system developed by Tau Scientific and the Fang-Yen laboratory monitored groups of 50 C. elegans in each well of standard six-well plates containing solid NGM agar and bacterial food lawns. The system recorded images every 5 seconds for 1 minute per hour over at least 15 hours, providing images for manual quantification of social aggregation, reported as the number of worms in physical contact with other worms under different genetic conditions.
6. Haskell D, Palo J, Eugene RFH, Large CRL, Hart MP. (2025). Variation in Social Feeding Behaviors and Interactions Among Caenorhabditis Nematodes. Ecology and Evolution, 15(11), e72522.
Equipment and application: The WormWatcher Imaging Station imaged multiple Caenorhabditis species in six-well plates containing solid agar and bacterial food lawns, recording clusters of 10 images over approximately 1 minute every hour for 20 hours. Images were used to manually quantify social aggregation and food-bordering behavior, producing measurements of the proportion of animals aggregating or occupying the food-lawn border across species and mixed-species conditions.
7. Haskell D, Haury WR, Granato M, Bastien BL, Hart MP. (2025). Insertion of rare autism variants in synaptic genes induce novel behavioral phenotypes in C. elegans. bioRxiv preprint.
Equipment and application: The WormWatcher Imaging Station was used to measure individual-worm activity in 48-well WorMotels containing solid agar, collecting images every 10 seconds for 8 hours under fed and food-deprived conditions. It also imaged groups of 50 worms on bacterial lawns in six-well agar plates over 20 hours, producing hourly pixel-displacement activity measurements and image-based counts of socially aggregating animals for comparison of autism-associated genetic variants.
8. Mace K, Zimmerman A, Chesi A, et al. (2026). Cross-species evidence for a developmental origin of adult hypersomnia with loss of synaptic adhesion molecules beat-Ia/CADM2. Nature Communications, 17, 1628.
Equipment and application: The Universal Vibration Stage (UVS-01) delivered controlled 1-second, 20 Hz mechanical stimuli once per hour over a 24-hour period to adult Drosophila housed individually in activity-monitoring tubes containing agar-based food. A separate Drosophila Activity Monitoring system recorded movement-related infrared beam interruptions before and after stimulation, allowing calculation of individual fly arousability from the number of successful responses to vibration during sleep.
9. Smisko WR, Haury WR, Perni M, et al. (2026). Allele-specific rescue of neurexin behavioral phenotypes by monoamine-targeting compounds. bioRxiv preprint.
Equipment and application: The WormWatcher Imaging Station performed 9-hour pharmacological activity assays with populations of approximately 25–30 C. elegans, or individual worms, swimming in M9 buffer with test compounds in 96-well plates; images were collected in 1-minute bursts every 10 minutes. Tau-developed software generated pixel-change activity measurements per well, normalized to vehicle controls for screening 190 compounds, while additional 20-hour imaging of worms on solid agar in six-well plates enabled quantification of drug-induced changes in social aggregation.
10. Shaver AO, McKeown R, Reyes Otero JM, et al. (2026). Evaluating beta-tubulin variants as predictors of benzimidazole resistance across Caenorhabditis nematodes. PLOS Pathogens, 22(6), e1014306.
Equipment and application: The Basic Imaging Platform was used to image offspring of C. briggsae and C. tropicalis on solid NGM agar plates during reproductive fecundity assays, with parent worms transferred to fresh plates every 24 hours across a 192-hour period. Plates corresponding to successive 24-hour reproductive intervals were imaged after 48 or 72 hours of offspring development, and the resulting images were manually analyzed in ImageJ to count progeny per plate and determine total reproductive output across genotypes.
11. Nir Halber S, Nir E, Stern S, Oren-Suissa M. (2026). A circadian clock gene homolog regulates developmental timing and male mating circuitry in C. elegans. iScience, 29(7), 116659.
Equipment and application: A WormWatcher vibration stage manufactured by Tau Scientific was used to mechanically disrupt developmental sleep in male C. elegans maintained on solid NGM agar plates with bacterial food. The apparatus delivered 1-second, 12,000 Hz vibration pulses every 10 seconds across the L4-to-adult developmental transition, enabling controlled sleep perturbation before subsequent measurements of mating success and neuronal circuit development; the stage provided stimulation rather than the downstream behavioral measurement.
12. Haskell D, Hart MP. (2026). In vivo dissection of human NRXN1 isoforms reveals gain-of-function pathogenicity of schizophrenia-associated 3′ deletions. Human Molecular Genetics, 35(18), ddag085.
Equipment and application: The WormWatcher Imaging Station recorded individual C. elegans on solid agar in 48-well WorMotels every 10 seconds for 8 hours, producing hourly pixel-displacement measurements of locomotor activity during food deprivation. Additional experiments imaged groups of 50 worms per well on bacterial lawns in six-well plates for 20 hours, generating images for manual quantification of social aggregation and comparison of behavioral effects among human NRXN1 isoforms.
13. Bilchak JN, Mace K, Luong J, Wu KJ, Kayser MS. (2026). Sensory-sleep dysfunction is a shared phenotype across genetically distinct neurodevelopmental disorder models. bioRxiv preprint.
Equipment and application: Mechanical vibration from a Universal Vibration Stage was used to induce sleep in adult Drosophila across three genetic models of neurodevelopmental disorders. The experiments compared baseline sleep, vibration-induced sleep, and responses to mechanical stimulation, revealing impaired sensory regulation of sleep across all three models.
14. Remes C, Mathew ND, Miranda V, et al. (2026). Dichloroacetate Improves Animal Survival, Growth, Neuromuscular Activity, Mitochondrial Stress and Physiology, and Elevated Lactate in C. elegans pdha-1 and dld-1 RNAi Models of Pyruvate Dehydrogenase Complex Deficiency (PDCD). Journal of Inherited Metabolic Disease, 49(6), e70257.
Equipment and application: An early prototype WormWatcher robot developed by the Fang-Yen laboratory was used to monitor populations of approximately 20 C. elegans per well on solid GelRite-based media in 24-well plates. Images acquired twice daily before and after blue-light stimulation over 30 days provided longitudinal measurements of locomotor activity, normalized to wild-type controls, to evaluate the effects of dichloroacetate treatment on mitochondrial disease models. Separately, a Tau Scientific Basic Imaging Platform equipped with a Basler camera and KOWA 75 mm lens was used to record 10-second videos of individual worms swimming in liquid S. Basal medium; videos were analyzed using the Fiji/ImageJ wrMTrck plugin to quantify swimming frequency in body bends per second, with 60 worms analyzed per condition.