Conventional toxicological assays have limitations: cellular models lack organismal complexity, and vertebrate testing is costly, ethically constrained, and low throughput. Caenorhabditis elegans provides a promising alternative, enabling whole-organism testing at an in vitro-like scale with easier handling and lower costs. To enhance scalability, we developed SydLab™ One, an automated microfluidic platform for culturing, treating, and…
Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans constitutes a valuable NAMs model for multiple applications, including predictive toxicology. This microscopic worm gained popularity for its ideal short size and life cycle, ease of cultivation and propagation, and powerful genetic toolkit. While C. elegans has the potential to complement in vitro models to better predict toxic outcomes in mammals, the…
Studies of the real-time dynamics of embryonic development require a gentle embryo handling method, the possibility of long-term live imaging during the complete embryogenesis, as well as of parallelization providing a population’s statistics, while keeping single embryo resolution. We describe an automated approach that fully accomplishes these requirements for embryos of Caenorhabditis elegans, one of…
Background While many biological studies can be performed on cell-based systems, the investigation of molecular pathways related to complex human dysfunctions – e.g. neurodegenerative diseases – often requires long-term studies in animal models. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans represents one of the best model organisms for many of these tests and, therefore, versatile and automated systems for accurate…
Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) constitutes an important model organism for use in nutrition and aging studies. We report a novel method for studying the dynamics of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacterial transit through the worms’ intestine. A microfluidic chip was designed for alternating C. elegans on-chip culture and immobilization, thereby enabling periodic high-resolution time-lapse imaging…
The organism Caenorhabditis elegans is a performant model system for studying human biological processes and diseases, but until now all phenome data are produced as population-averaged read-outs. Monitoring of individual responses to drug treatments would however be more informative. Here, a new strategy to track different phenotypic traits of individual C. elegans nematodes throughout their…
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is an important model organism for biomedical research and genetic studies relevant to human biology and disease. Such studies are often based on high-resolution imaging of dynamic biological processes in the worm body tissues, requiring well-immobilized and physiologically active animals in order to avoid movement-related artifacts and to obtain meaningful biological…
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is increasingly used as a model for human biology. However, in vivo culturing platforms for C. elegans allowing high-content phenotyping during their life cycle in an automated fashion are lacking so far. Here, a multiplexed microfluidic platform for the rapid high-content phenotyping of populations of C. elegans down to single animal…
Phenotyping strategies in simple model organisms such as D. melanogaster and C. elegans are often broadly limited to growth, aging, and fitness. Recently, a number of physical setups and video tracking software suites have been developed to allow for accurate, quantitative, and high-throughput analysis of movement in flies and worms. However, many of these systems require…