[size=12pt]Help——how to discriminate dead worms in lifespan assay?
many papers said worms that crawled off the plate, exploded,or bagged were censored at the time of event.I wanna to know how to discriminate exploded,or bagged worms in lifespan assay[/size]
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I’m not entirely sure I understand the question - are you just asking about the terms?
“exploded worms” are worms that appear to have exploded, their innards have spilled from inside their body onto the plate, typically at the vulva.
“bagged worms” are worms that have become a “bag of worms”, that have had progeny hatch within them, instead of being laid as an egg; these progeny then kill their mothers by mechanical damage and by feeding on them.
It should in theory be possible to find and account for any worms that “crawled off the plate”, they will typically dry out and die halfway up the plastic wall of the plate.
One nice thing about using E. coli is that it’s really bad at digesting dead worms, so you can typically find a dead worm and see what happened to it; some other bacteria are much more effective at disposing of the bodies.
In a lifespan assay - and with the caveat that this isn’t something I have done or know extremely well - the main thing being scored is the time until what might be called a natural death, a death from senescence or decrepitude. A worm that more or less maintains its integrity and doesn’t die as the direct result of some sort of obvious damage, it just craps out eventually, goes to sleep and cannot be woken up even when prodded.
The question of censoring animals that die from other problems is of course a complicated one - what if those animals that become deranged and crawl up the wall of the plate and desiccate, or those that lose bodily integrity and “explode” at the vulva, are reflecting some aspect of the aging process?
when you touch the worms with your pick and if they dont move at all, not even slight head or tail movement, that means your that particular worm is dead.
bagged phenotype happens when you see embryo hatching inside mother hermaphrodite, and when it erupts out that means that worm is exploded and obviously you censor them from your lifespan assay.
Death, as mentioned above, usually means that the worm does not move upon prodding with a pick.
However, you should keep track of all of your worms in the life span assay, including bag of worms (BOW) and those that crawl up the sides and die.
Some mutations increase the risk of wandering or becoming a BOW, so if you do not note these somewhere in your data you will lose information.
Generally the lifespan graphs only show the data from worms that die and stop moving (not the dessicated or BOW).
Janet