Microfluidic Platforms for Whole-animal Screening with C. Elegans

This talk will present recent innovations pursued in Ben-Yakar research group towards developing microfluidic platforms and imaging modalities for whole-animal screening using C. elegans. Their small body size and survivability in liquid medium make C. elegans suitable for microfluidic manipulations. Their transparent body is ideal for in vivo optical manipulations such as precise laser axotomy and 3D high-resolution imaging. To enable high-throughput studies using this model organism, our group has developed fully automated, high-speed microfluidic platforms to immobilize them for precise laser axotomy (~17 seconds per axotomy in a single worm) and high-resolution 3D imaging (~4000 worms in 10 minutes). We also developed population delivery chips that are capable of dispensing individual worm populations from 64 on-chip wells for serial optical analysis to another microfluidic device at ultrafast speeds (~2 seconds per population delivery). More recently, we developed an ultra-fast confocal system for capturing fluorescence dynamics from single neurons at 30 frames per second for volumetric imaging. These automated microfluidic and imaging platforms will enable high-throughput screening of C. elegans for finding new genes and drugs for nerve regeneration and neurodegenerative diseases at a large scale.