The Worm Podcast8 Loka 2025

EPISODE 30: Timelines of Ageing – What Worms Teach Us About Growing Old

In this episode, we dive into a new version of WormGazer as described in a recent GeroScience paper. This implementation automates movement monitoring in C. elegans populations as a rapid healthspan measure, offering a shortcut to detect ageing interventions and trade-offs.

Highlights include:

• Monitoring multiple Petri dishes in parallel with cameras and image analysis over 7–14 days

• Showing that most functional decline happens in the first week of adulthood

• Validating with age-1(hx546) mutants, which remain active longer but move more slowly early on

• A dose-response test with sulfamethoxazole (SMX) where movement improvements are detectable within 7 days, compared to 40 days needed for traditional lifespan assays

• The benefit: non-invasive, scalable, and faster detection of ageing effects and negative trade-offs

📖 Based on the research article:

“Rapid measurement of ageing by automated monitoring of movement of C. elegans populations”

Giulia Zavagno, Adelaide Raimundo, Andy Kirby, Christopher Saunter & David Weinkove

Published in GeroScience (November 2023)

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11357-023-00998-w

🎧 Subscribe to the WOrM Podcast for more breakthroughs in whole-organism ageing, automation, and quantitative biology.

This podcast is generated with artificial intelligence and curated by Veeren. If you’d like your publication featured on the show, please get in touch.

📩 More info:

🔗 ⁠⁠www.veerenchauhan.com⁠⁠

📧 veeren.chauhan@nottingham.ac.uk

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