Tips to remove progeny from liquid culture

Hi everyone,

I need to grow and age worms in liquid culture but I am reluctanct to use FUdR to sterilize them. I know that sedimentation usually selects for the bigger adults, but it’s not 100% effective. I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions to separate my aging adult worms from their progeny in liquid culture? I will have a relatively large number of worms so picking them manually is not going to be possible.

Thanks! :slight_smile:

you could do a first-pass clean up with one or two sedimentations, then filter out the big worms (or just proceed right away with filtering). there are protocols for using filters to enrich males vs hermaphrodites, so larvae vs. adults should be easy.

if you spin at low speed onto the mesh then they will continue thrashing and larvae will work their way through. a pore size of maybe 25 microns would be good (?). of course i haven’t tried it but it sounds like fun

places like this have appropriate filters.
http://www.membrane-solutions.com/nylon_mesh_filter.htm

Thanks! I will give it a go.

There have been a couple of previous posts that address this issue (e.g., http://forums.wormbase.org/index.php?topic=573.msg1011;topicseen#msg1011).