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Beleaguered by criticisms, and abused by politicians for ecological target-setting, biofuels are in their darkest hour. But their bringing to trial should remind us - yet again - of something else: the highly questionable sustainability of most of modern agriculture. Is this the end of biofuels? Probably not, but it is certainly the end of a cheap solution to the problem of sustainable portable fuels. Part one of this two-part article focuses on the political and agricultural dimensions of the topic.

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We present the WormPharm, an automated microfluidic platform that utilizes an axenic medium to culture C. elegans . The WormPharm is capable of sustaining C. elegans for extended periods, while recording worm development and growth with high temporal resolution ranging from seconds to minutes over several days to months. We demonstrate the utility of the device to monitor C. elegans growth in the presence of varying doses of nicotine and alcohol. Furthermore, we show that C. elegans cultured in the WormPharm are amendable for high-throughput genomic assays, i.e. chromatin-immunoprecipitation followed by next generation sequencing, and confirm that nematodes grown in monoxenic and axenic cultures exhibit genetic modifications that correlate with observed phenotypes. The WormPharm is a powerful tool for analyzing the effects of chemical, nutritional and environmental variations on organism level responses in conjunction with genome-wide changes in C. elegans .