Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 12, 2025

Measuring Caenorhabditis elegans Life Span on Solid Media
Published on: May 12, 2009
Easy C. elegans Worm Lifespan Plotting and Statistics with WLSplot
Blaise L Mariner1,2, Jack Peterson1, Jackson C Taylor1
1Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States.
Abstract:
WLSplot is an R package used to easily analyze lifespan survival data, and display results graphically as a survival curve with useful labels and statistical information auto-generated from the data and added to the graph, within a single function. It is designed primarily with Caenorhabditis elegans lifespan data in mind initially but can easily be used for other types of survival data. The WLSplot GitHub repository provides a blank template spreadsheet to be used for collecting lifespan data, instructions on how to install and run WLSplot, and examples covering RNAi, Genotype, or Drug lifespan experimental set-ups. WLSplot can analyze and plot multiple experiments in bulk while correctly italicizing worm gene names and adding asterisks and p-values to the plot legend when a significantly different lifespan from the designated control lifespan is seen. This is returned as an editable scalable vector graphics (svg) file for each output, and WLSplot can also return the summary of the directly plotted data so that the researcher can do their own further manipulation, in addition to being able to edit the output svg files.

