Fig. 1: AVK-derived FLP-1 suppresses excessive excitability.

a Multi-Worm Tracker (MWT) setup with blue and red illumination and tapping device⁴². Representative trajectories obtained for wild type and flp-1 mutant animals are shown. Color code represents time as shown in bi. Representative animal skeletons after tapping (t = 920) are shown in insets. Note that enhanced and prolonged ‘speed increase’ after tapping of flp-1 mutants are represented by longer turquoise-red traces. b–j Locomotion of animals with the indicated genotype was tracked using MWT. NGM plates were tapped three times at 1 Hz, 900 s after recording began. ‘Body bending’ and ‘straightness’ were defined as described in Supplementary Fig. 1e. Basal speed (c), body bending (f) and straightness (i) indicate mean values from t = 840 to 899. ‘Speed increase’ (d) and ‘Change in body bending’ (g) indicate mean values from t = 911 to 960 subtracted by basal values. The mean straightness after tapping (t = 911 ~ 1020) was plotted in j. Tukey test was performed. ***p < 0.001. Note that tracks are temporally lost upon tapping, causing large variations and losses of data points. Approximately 20–120 animals were involved in each recording. k–p. Wild type N2 strain and animals for AVK-specific feeding RNAi strain (zxSi9[ptwk-47::rde-1:SL2:sid-1]; rde-1(ne300)) were fed with HT115 bacteria carrying a control vector or a plasmid encoding RNAi for flp-1. Animals were then subjected to behavioral analysis as described in a. Tukey test was performed. Approximately 20-80 animals were involved in each recording. N indicates the numbers of independent experiments from different populations. In timeseries plots, data are presented as mean values +/- standard error of the mean (SEM). In boxplots, the boxes extend from the first quartile (Q1) to third quartile (Q3), with the band inside the boxes representing the median. The whiskers extend to the smallest and largest values within 1.5 times the inter-quartile range (IQR), where IQR is the difference between Q3 and Q1. Source data are provided in ‘Source Data 1’ file.