Commercial sources of large quantities of C. elegans

Model Organism: Worms General Discussion
1

Dear all

I’m a former member of a C. elegans lab (Michael Hengartner) and now working at a proteomics company. We use C. elegans as a proteomics QC sample because it is far from human in terms of evolution but has a similar complexity.
We are looking for a commercial source of relatively large quantities of C. elegans. In one order we’d need around 100mg of C. elegans. The source should be as controlled and simple as possible. For instance standard strain (Bristol N2) grown in liquid culture, with defined medium, defined E. coli strain, for a defined period of time and with a defined harvesting protocol. In the end the protocol doesn’t really matter. It simply matters that there is enough material in the end and the protocol is very reproducible.

Does anybody know where one could place such an order?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,
Lukas

2

I don’t know if this is especially helpful - it’s not a commercial source, I don’t know about commercial sources - but have you tried contacting some of the people who work on natural products of C. elegans? Such as the ascaroside researchers, who regularly grow up batches of worms in liquid culture under controlled conditions in order to recover what the worms secrete into the media, and who don’t necessarily have much use for the worms themselves? If they’re not able to help you, they might still know someone who is. Stephan von Reuss is fairly local to you, you might try him.