Surveying Low-Cost Methods to Measure Lifespan and Healthspan in <em>Caenorhabditis elegans</em>

Abstract

The discovery and development of Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism was influential in biology, particularly in the field of aging. Many historical and contemporary studies have identified thousands of lifespan-altering paradigms, including genetic mutations, transgenic gene expression, and hormesis, a beneficial, low-grade exposure to stress. With its many advantages, including a short lifespan, easy and low-cost maintenance, and fully sequenced genome with homology to almost two-thirds of all human genes, C. elegans has quickly been adopted as an outstanding model for stress and aging biology. Here, several standardized methods are surveyed for measuring lifespan and healthspan that can be easily adapted into almost any research environment, especially those with limited equipment and funds. The incredible utility of C. elegans is featured, highlighting the capacity to perform powerful genetic analyses in aging biology without the necessity of extensive infrastructure. Finally, the limitations of each analysis and alternative approaches are discussed for consideration.

Glial-derived mitochondrial signals affect neuronal proteostasis and aging

“…All C. elegans strains are derivatives of the Bristol N2 wild-type strain from the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center (CGC) and are listed in Table 1. All worms were grown at 15° to 20°C on NGM (nematode growth medium) agar plates, fed with OP50 Escherichia coli B strain as a food source, for general maintenance, and handled as previously described ( 50 ). For all experiments, worms were switched to HT115 E. coli K12 strain after synchronization using bleaching.…”

Large‐scale genetic screens identify BET‐1 as a cytoskeleton regulator promoting actin function and life span

“…For tunicamycin and paraquat survival assays, animals are grown on RNAi plates until day 1 of adulthood. At day 1, animals are moved onto RNAi plates containing 25 μg/ml tunicamycin or 2.5 mM paraquat as previously described (Castro Torres et al, 2022 ). All statistical analysis was performed using Prism7 software using LogRank testing.…”

Mechanical stress through growth on stiffer substrates impacts animal health and longevity inC. elegans

“…281210). For our stiffer substrate, we utilized 4% agar w/v, as this was the highest concentration of agar we could accomplish without having issues with the agar either precipitating or solidifying prior to cooling sufficiently to add liquid additives for standard NGM plate-pouring (refer to [15] for a detailed protocol on making NGM plates). When wild-type animals were grown on stiffer substrates from the L1 larval stage, we found that animals exhibited a mild, but significant increase in lifespan ( Fig.…”

“…Indeed, numerous previous studies have shown hyperactivation of specific stress responses, including the unfolded protein responses of the mitochondria (UPR MT ) [16], the endoplasmic reticulum (UPR ER ) [17], and heat-shock response (HSR) [18] all extend longevity. In addition, several of these stress response-mediated longevity paradigms are associated with a decrease in reproductive potential [15,19], which mirrors phenotypes found on animals grown on stiffer substrates. However, we found that stress responses were largely unchanged ( Fig.…”