Measuring Food Intake and Nutrient Absorption in Caenorhabditis elegans.

ABSTRACT: Caenorhabditis elegans has emerged as a powerful model to study the genetics of feeding, food-related behaviors, and metabolism. Despite the many advantages of C. elegans as a model organism, direct measurement of its bacterial food intake remains challenging. Here, we describe two complementary methods that measure the food intake of C. elegans. The first method is a microtiter plate-based bacterial clearing assay that measures food intake by quantifying the change in the optical density of bacteria over time. The second method, termed pulse feeding, measures the absorption of food by tracking de novo protein synthesis using a novel metabolic pulse-labeling strategy. Using the bacterial clearance assay, we compare the bacterial food intake of various C. elegans strains and show that long-

SUBMITTER: Gomez-Amaro RL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4492371 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature