Worm+Care


 * Home** **==> Worm Care

Welcome to the Worm Care** **Page**! This is where you can find all of the things that have to do with Worm Care in this experiment. The video on our home page shows how healthy our worms are!

(This above is a picture of healthy worms, this is how they look right now. Both of these pictures are taken under a microscope. The worms are very tiny. They are about 1 mm long. ) (This above is a picture of some dying worms who are clumping and and basically eating each other to survive. Not good)

The following explains how to prepare plates on to which the worms can be plated. NGM-lite is a growth medium on which OP50 can grow. OP50 is a strain of E.Coli and the bacteria that the worms eat for food.

Recipe for 250mL NGM-lite Plates: 1. .5g NaCl 1g Bactotryptone .75g K 2 HPO 4 0.125g K 2 HPO 4 5g agar.25ml of 5 mg/mL cholestrol (dissolved in 100% ethanol)

2. Add to suitable flask. 3. Add 250ml of deionized or distilled water. 4. Stir to dissolve then autoclave for 20 minutes. 5. Let the solution cool for 10 minutes and then pour the solution into 6 cm petri dishes so that the plates are a little over halfway full.

Seeding Plates Once the plates have the NGM-lite medium on them, they must be seeded with the OP50 bacteria. You seed the plates by pipetting 100-125 ul of OP50 on to the NGM-lite plate and spreading it around. Incubate these plates overnight.

Once the plates are all ready and incubated, they can be stacked and stored in the fridge.

This is a picture of a seeded plate that is ready for use.

"Chunking" is basically a way to keep the worms alive. We take a "chunk" of the agar and the worms from a plate with growing worms and transfer this to another plate so the worms have a fresh plate and food to grow on.


 * Chunking Worm Plates (This step maintains the growth of the worms)**
 * Take plate with previously growing N2 worms
 * Sterilize scalpel using alcohol and flame.
 * Cut a square in the agar on the growing N2 worm plate


 * Gently pick up the square using the scalpel and flip it worm side down onto a seeded plate.
 * Confirm that worms are on the plate using a microscope.
 * Rechunk the worms every 3-4 days so that the worms always have new food and they don't die.
 * Once the worms have been chunked onto their new plates, they can be stored in a room, in their plates at room temperature.

We have to make sure that the plates made are sterile and that the chunking is done in a sterile manner, otherwise, the plates could get contaminated and end up looking like this (black spot at top).

So that basically wraps up everything involved in taking care of our precious worms. Unfortunately for us (but fortunately for the worms) we were unable to successfully complete the experiment. But, now you know how the worms were kept healthy in this experiment.

Thank you!

//Edited by Aashay Vyas//