1 A Neuroendocrine Modulation to Sustain C. elegans Forward Locomotion Maria A. Lim 1# , Jyothsna Chitturi 1,2 , Valeriya Laskova 1,3 , Jun Meng 1,3 , Daniel Findeis 4 , Anne Wiekenberg 4 , Ben Mulcahy 1 , Linjiao Luo 5 , Yan Li 1,3 , Yangning Lu 1,3 , Wesley Hung 1 , Yixin Qu 1 , Chi-Yip Ho 1 , Douglas Holmyard 1 , Rebecca McWhirter 6 , Ni Ji 6 , Aravinthan D. T. Samuel 6 , David M. Miller, III 7 , Ralf Schnabel 4 , John A. Calarco 8# , Mei Zhen 1,2,3# 1 Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, ON, Canada 2 Institute of Medical Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada 3 Department of Physiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada 4 Technische Universität Braunschweig Carolo Wilhelmina, Institut für Genetik, Braunschweig, Germany 5 Key Laboratory of Modern Acoustics, Ministry of Education, Department of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China 6 Center for Brain Science and Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA 7 Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA 8 FAS Center for Systems Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA # Correspondence (lim@lunenfeld.ca; jcalarco@fas.harvard.edu; zhen@lunenfeld.ca) Highlights • RID is a specialized peptidergic neuron. • UNC-39/Six/SO governs RID neurogenesis. • Subtractive RNA profiling uncovers FLP, INS and NLP neuropeptides in RID. • RID sustains C. elegans forward locomotion in part through FLP-14. certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not this version posted July 23, 2016. ; https://doi.org/10.1101/065235 doi: bioRxiv preprint