MBF Bioscience WormLab 2024 for tracking C. elegans

MBF Bioscience has released the latest version of WormLab — a complete hardware and software system for imaging, tracking and quantitative analysis of C. elegans behaviour. With its user-friendly interface and powerful analysis capabilities, the system continues to provide researchers with invaluable tools to fully characterise a wide range of worm behaviours, including crawling worms, swimming/thrashing worms, whole plate and long-term tracking.

A floating licence option is now available for the Mac version of the software, providing the flexibility to run the WormLab licence on different computers. There is improved support for videos, with variable keyframe intervals to enable faster, smoother scrolling through videos, and it is user-configurable to optimise performance for short- or long-duration videos.

Batch processing is now possible and allows users to directly add videos or previously saved project files to the tracking queue and apply saved tracking configurations to multiple videos. The configuration manager is now expanded to save/load labels in addition to tracking parameters, allowing for efficient workflow. A new ‘Apply’ button has been included to test Head/Tail assignment settings.

The expanded analysis capabilities include the addition of Integral Measurement (Full/Positive/Negative) to the Report tab of Bending Angles – Multiple analysis. Label Overlap analysis reports the time point when a worm’s head, midpoint or tail (user-selectable) enters/exits a label region, and multiple projects can be selected and deleted in Group analysis. Another addition is the Number of Omega Bends and Omega Bend Time in Track Summary analysis.