# Wormtrails: a python package for viewing C. elegans movement

**Authors:** Christopher Dante Ashih, Yuyan Xu, Javier Apfeld

PMC · DOI: 10.17912/micropub.biology.001934 · 2026-02-23

## TL;DR

Wormtrails is a Python tool that creates visualizations of C. elegans movement on solid media using color-coded images and videos.

## Contribution

The novel contribution is a Python package that encodes time as color to visualize worm locomotion, particularly for chemotaxis studies.

## Key findings

- Wormtrails converts darkfield or brightfield images into color-coded visualizations of worm movement.
- The package is useful for visualizing locomotion in chemotaxis and other behavioral assays.
- It provides a flexible tool for analyzing and presenting C. elegans locomotory patterns.

## Abstract

Wormtrails is a python package designed to create images and videos depicting the motion of

C. elegans

on solid media. Darkfield or brightfield images may be converted into stills or movies, with time encoded by color. This package was primarily designed to be used for visualizing locomotion during chemotaxis, but it may be used to visualize locomotory patterns in a wide array of behavioral assays.

## Full-text entities

- **Species:** C. elegans [taxon 328850]

## Figures

1 figure with captions in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12973072/full.md

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12973072