Have you ever wondered what happened to worms as they get old? Now it is possible to observe them over their entire life thanks to a microfluidic device developed by US scientists. 

The device, made by George Whitesides and colleagues at Harvard University, Cambridge, houses individual worms (Caenorhabditis elegans) in an array of chambers and a network of microfluidic channels to deliver food and remove waste. Confinement in the chamber ensures that the worms do not move from the field of view without interrupting their normal swimming motions. Also the identities of the worms are kept allowing repeated measurements of behavioural and physiological traits of each individual. 

The properties of Caenorhabditis elegans make it useful for studying a wide variety of diseases and biological processes, including Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and ageing. Although there are a number of microfluidic tools used to study worms, this is the first device that can be used to observe individual worms over their entire life.

Whitesides demonstrated the new technology by tracking age-related changes in body size and swimming behaviour for individual worms over their entire adult life. 'Our device is designed to help worm biologists to carry out controlled experiments using statistically large numbers of worms,' says Whitesides. This will allow researches to study the extent variation exist in populations of genetically identical worms, he adds.

Hang Lu, an expert in microfluidic technologies at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, US, remarks 'this is a simple and neat device to culture Caenorhabditis elegans for days and observe their locomotions, something that biologists that study ageing have long wanted.'

Keith Farrington 

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