Hi all,
Just wanted to know, is it okay to keep the worms at 4C for few weeks in NGM plates with food?
Does their development stop? I hope they dont die !
Some will die at 4 degrees. I was told that 10 degrees C is the minimum temperature without loss. (I don’t know a reference for this.)
According to what I’ve been told, and my recollections of what I’ve seen others do, four degrees will kill your worms. Ten degrees will cause developmental arrest (it was used to get a break during long-term lineage studies), and works very well for long term storage (at the least, for long-term storage of starved L1s and dauers; I don’t know about long-term storage of animals developmentally arrested only because of the temperature). 12.5 degrees can be used if you want your worms to continue growing and reproducing, very slowly.
If you want best results for long-term storage, maximum cleanliness (minimal contamination) helps, and sealing your plates with Parafilm - just make sure you don’t get a liquid seal around the base of the plate, as this can suffocate the worms.
just seen this post…for your information, there is somewhere in the wormbook a reference to keeping worms for upto 15 hour at 4 degrees without problems (I don’t know if that was anecdotal or experimentally proven).
We have kept L3 & L4 worms for 72 hours at 4 degrees and they are fine…they pause in their development but 98% recover and proceed without problems to adulthood. We have not yet tested longer periods…
Regards
Steve
Yes, worms do survive for 15 hours or so, kept at 4C !
As a last, desperate attempt when I realised that I had messed up some timings, I stuck some adult worms in at 4C over the weekend. This did appear to completely halt their reproduction, but when transferred to more hospitable temperatures on Monday, the majority of them went on to recover and reproduce.