High-Throughput, Motility-Based Sorter for Microswimmers and Gene Discovery Platform

Animal motility varies with genotype, disease progression, aging, and environmental conditions. In many studies, it is desirable to carry out high throughput motility-based sorting to isolate rare animals for, among other things, forward genetic screens to identify genetic pathways that regulate phenotypes of interest. Many commonly used screening processes are labor-intensive, lack sensitivity, and require extensive investigator training. Here, we describe a sensitive, high throughput, automated, motility-based method for sorting nematodes. Our method was implemented in a simple microfluidic device capable of sorting many thousands of animals per hour per module, and is amenable to parallelism. The device successfully enriched for known \textit{C. elegans} motility mutants. Furthermore, using this device, we isolated low-abundance mutants capable of suppressing the somnogenic effects of the \textit{flp-13} gene, which regulates sleep-like quiescence in \textit{C. elegans}. Subsequent genomic sequencing led to the identification of a \textit{flp-13}-suppressor gene.