We're developing a simple approach that can immobilize the entire Caenorhabditis elegans population directly onto cultivation plates. This strategy significantly accelerates imaging-related experiments. The sodium azide immobilization typically used for high resolution imaging of the C.elegans population is extremely labor-intensive, requiring individual animal mounting and handling.
This method can also reduce animal lifespan and viability, which can confound data. Traditional cooling method used relatively low temperatures of two to four degrees Celsius of employed microfluid, which requires extensive user training. We found that with the cooling stage, the warm temperatures like six degree Celsius, more strongly immobilize animals for high revolution imaging.
Cooling immobilization of C.elegans is not widely used but when used, it is usually combined with complex microfluidics that requires significant user training. Due to the shortcoming of the typical immobilization methodology, our improvement of cooling mobilization and accessibility enables high throughput and higher-resolution imaging for researchers. Compared to labor-intensive mounting and anesthetizing of individual animals, our cooling approach can reversibly immobilize large C.elegans populations, eliminating 98%of processing time.
The lack of chemical anesthetics also minimizes harmful exposure to animals and researchers. A cooling stage allows for high throughput and high-resolution imaging directly on cultivation plates. The simplicity of this design enables other researchers to easily build their own devices and integrate them into their existing setups, to revolutionize the scope and the pace of their biological studies.
Our laboratory will adapt the cooling stage for various microscope configurations. Different designs will work with inverted microscopes, compound upright microscopes, as well as different imaging platforms.
