Wormpharm: A Microfluidic Platform for Pharmacogenetic Studies on C. Elegans

Our lab has developed the WormPharm platform that utilizes microfluidics to allow automated culturing and imaging of C. elegans exposed to pharmaceuticals. Current problems with pharmaceutical experiments using C. elegans include, extensive plate maintenance and animal transfer, and additional drug metabolism by bacterial food sources. As a solution, we have modified a chemically synthetic axenic media for use with the WormPharm platform. System automation allows us to perform experiments that can last weeks to months. Alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine constitute the three most commonly consumed psychoactive drugs around the globe, making them prime compounds for pharmaceutical assays. To date, our platform has been used to study the individual and combinatorial effects of all three drugs. In our study, we found that the effects of these drugs when introduced in axenic media varied greatly both individually and in combination. We have examined locomotive behavior, pharyngeal pump rate, and morphological deformities upon drug dose. Our results show that these psychoactive drugs cause severe phenotypic effects on C. elegans when used in combination, but not individually. Additionally, the WormPharm is able to culture ample amounts of worms to conduct next generation sequencing, and we present results correlating phenotype and genotype with different combination of alcohol, caffeine and nicotine.