Dopamine is required for normal octanol avoidance response.

<p><i>cat-2</i> codes for tyrosine hydroxylase, a key enzyme in the dopamine biosynthetic pathway <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0102958#pone.0102958-Lints1" target="_blank">[38]</a>. <i>cat-2</i> mutants are defective for octanol response, but are fully restored to wild type response latencies when tested with exogenous dopamine. <i>eat-4</i> codes for a vesicular glutamate transporter that loads glutamate into synaptic vesicles <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0102958#pone.0102958-Lee1" target="_blank">[14]</a>. <i>eat-4</i> mutants respond substantially slower than <i>cat-2</i> mutants, and are resistant to exogenous dopamine. Both <i>cat-2</i> and <i>eat-4</i> mutations are predicted nulls. In this and all the following figures, dopamine was added directly to the surface of standard NGM agar plates; distilled water was used as the vehicle control (see Materials and Methods for details). Sample sizes and detailed numbers are available in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0102958#pone.0102958.s001" target="_blank">Data S1</a>. Error bars indicate S.E.M. Comparisons are to wild type unless otherwise noted. ***p<0.0001.