First published online October 5, 2007
Journal of Experimental Biology 210, 3696 (2007)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2007
doi: 10.1242/jeb.012815
Sensorimotor control during isothermal tracking in Caenorhabditis elegans
Linjiao Luo,
Damon A. Clark,
David Biron,
L. Mahadevan and
Aravinthan D. T. Samuel
The authors made several errors in reporting the average duration of
isothermal tracks made by C. elegans on spatial thermal gradients of
varying gradient steepness and on spatial thermal gradients in the presence of
bacterial food. These errors affect the paper in three places.
- The second and third sentence in the second paragraph of the Results on p.
4653 should have read as follows (with changes shown in bold):
Using radial thermal gradients with a defined steepness of
0.2–1.3°C cm–1, we found that the durations of
isothermal tracks are exponentially distributed and on average about 35
s long. In other words, the statistics of terminating an isothermal track
are Poisson: during each second of an isothermal track, C. elegans
has a 3% likelihood of terminating the track by spontaneously
reorienting itself with an abrupt turn of reversal (Fig. 1D).
- Fig. 1E should have appeared as shown below:
- The caption for Fig. 2B should have read as follows (with changes shown in
bold):
(B) Histogram of the durations of isothermal tracks of wild-type worms
navigating a radial thermal gradient with 0.7°C
cm–1 steepness in the presence of bacterial lawns. The
solid line shows a fit to an exponential (
=102 s;
P>0.2).
These errors do not affect the conclusions of the paper, namely that
isothermal tracks are much longer than runs in isotropic environments and that
isothermal tracks in the presence of food can be longer than in the absence of
food.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to Prof. Miriam Goodman (Stanford) for bringing
these errors to their attention.
