Longitudinal imaging of Caenorhabditis elegans in a microfabricated device reveals variation in behavioral decline during aging
- University of Pennsylvania, United States
Abstract
The roundworm C. elegans is a mainstay of aging research due to its short lifespan and easily manipulable genetics. Current, widely used methods for long-term measurement of C. elegans are limited by low throughput and the difficulty of performing longitudinal monitoring of aging phenotypes. Here we describe the WorMotel, a microfabricated device for long-term cultivation and automated longitudinal imaging of large numbers of C. elegans confined to individual wells. Using the WorMotel, we find that short-lived and long-lived strains exhibit patterns of behavioral decline that do not temporally scale between individuals or populations, but rather resemble the shortest and longest lived individuals in a wild type population. We also find that behavioral trajectories of worms subject to oxidative stress resemble trajectories observed during aging. Our method is a powerful and scalable tool for analysis of C. elegans behavior and aging.
Article and author information
Author details
Christopher Fang-Yen
Funding
National Institutes of Health (R01-NS-084835)
- Matthew A Churgin
- Christopher Fang-Yen
Ellison Medical Foundation (AG-NS-1109-13)
- Sang-Kyu Jung
- Xiangmei Chen
European Commission (633589)
- Christopher Fang-Yen
National Institutes of Health (R01-NS-088432)
- David M Raizen
- Christopher Fang-Yen
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (BR2012-084)
- Christopher Fang-Yen
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2017, Churgin et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 6,845
- views
-
- 916
- downloads
-
- 142
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Citations by DOI
-
- 142
- citations for umbrella DOI https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.26652
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Longitudinal imaging of Caenorhabditis elegans in a microfabricated device reveals variation in behavioral decline during aging
eLife 6:e26652.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.26652
