Longitudinal imaging of Caenorhabditis elegans in a microfabricated device reveals variation in behavioral decline during aging.

Matthew A Churgin,Xiangmei Chen,Sang-Kyu Jung,David M Raizen,Christopher Fang-Yen,Chih-Chieh Yu

doi:10.7554/elife.26652

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.

Highlights

Aging consists of gradual changes in an adult organism that cause a reduction of function and an increase in mortality
We found no difference in developmental rate of worms grown from the L3 stage to adulthood in the presence of an NGM Buffer (NGMB) (L4 Duration = 12.2 ± 0.2 hr) and copper sulfate moat (L4 Duration = 12.2 ± 0.2 hr, p=0.95)
These results show that the behavioral decline of daf-16 animals is not a scaled version of the wild type distribution of decline, but instead resembles the short-lived individuals in a wild-type population

Summary

Introduction

Aging consists of gradual changes in an adult organism that cause a reduction of function and an increase in mortality. Widely used methods for long-term measurement of C. elegans aging are based on manual inspection of worm survival on agar plates. These methods are robust and technically simple, but have a number of limitations. One method produces high resolution survival curves by monitoring large populations of animals on standard agar plates using flatbed scanners (Stroustrup et al, 2013). This method monitors only lifespan and is not designed to track individual animals over their entire lifetime. This system is limited in its ability to study aging in individual animals

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Conclusion