Berry, Faith, Estes, Raja, Blue, Ben W., Pitt, Jason, Kim, Young-Woo, Vayndorf, Elena, Nikjoo, Arash, Kaeberlein, Matt, Pothan, Lincoln
[
International Worm Meeting,
2019]
C. elegans has been a workhorse within the field of aging biology due to its short lifespan, easy culturing, and robust genetic tools. However, one major limiting factor in using C. elegans has been that throughput was constrained by the time and effort needed to manually check each worm for signs of life during longitudinal studies. By using the WormBot, a high-throughput robotic image capture platform, we were able to accurately and quickly screen a wide array of compounds for their effects on C. elegans lifespan. A single WormBot can monitor 144 individual experiments at once and, when coupled with an image analysis package, allows for accurate time of death calls. Here we present data generated with the WormBot that includes a screen of compounds from a wide array of natural and synthetic products. Supplements and multivitamin/minerals (MVMs) were a ~36 billion dollar industry in 2014 but are not subject to the same regulatory standards that FDA-approved drugs are. In order to better examine the effects of these widely-used compounds upon the aging process we examined longevity in a wildtype strain of C. elegans (N2) as well as an engineered strain (GMC101) that expresses human A? protein in the body wall muscle. The age-related pathogenesis of the A?-expressing strain is a progressive paralysis. As such, we screened our battery of compounds to determine which compounds have a significant effect on delaying GMC101's A?-associated paralysis. Lastly, using the WormBot's ability to capture video recording alongside time-lapse photography, we examine how each compound affects the healthspan of the different genetic models by using the WormBot's ability to capture high-resolution videos and then analyzing animal motility.