{"doi":"10.1101/2023.09.01.555781","title":"The Egg-Counter: A novel microfluidic platform for characterization of <i>Caenorhabditis elegans</i> egg-laying","abstract":"Abstract Reproduction is a fundamental process that shapes the demography of every living organism yet is often difficult to assess with high precision in animals that produce large numbers of offspring. Here, we present a novel microfluidic research platform for studying Caenorhabditis elegans’ egg-laying. The platform provides higher throughput than traditional solid-media assays while providing a very high degree of temporal resolution. Additionally, the environmental control enabled by microfluidic animal husbandry allows for experimental perturbations difficult to achieve with solid-media assays. We demonstrate the platform’s utility by characterizing C. elegans egg-laying behavior at two commonly used temperatures, 15 and 20°C. As expected, we observed a delayed onset of egg-laying at 15°C degrees, consistent with published temperature effects on development rate. Additionally, as seen in solid media studies, egg laying output was higher under the canonical 20°C conditions. While we validated the Egg-Counter with a study of temperature effects in wild-type animals, the platform is highly adaptable to any nematode egg-laying research where throughput or environmental control needs to be maximized without sacrificing temporal resolution.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2023,"id":390580,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":10,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9545,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":424635,"name":"Cody M. Jarrett","orcid":"0000-0002-1024-5074","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1145646,"name":"Kristin J. Robinson","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":424638,"name":"Benjamin W. Blue","orcid":"0000-0002-2087-9783","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1162372,"name":"Emily L. Shaw","orcid":"0009-0001-4419-7816","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":352930,"name":"Patrick C. Phillips","orcid":"0000-0001-7271-342X","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":424633,"name":"Stephen A. Banse","orcid":"0000-0002-5540-4526","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":76,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:18:37.743462Z","pmid":"37732270","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}