Methods for Measuring Resistance to Multiple Stressors in Caenorhabditis elegans

Organisms are exposed to a variety of environmental and cellular stressors throughout their lives. The capability to resist different stressors closely correlates with organisms' healthspan and lifespan. Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) is an ideal model organism for stress resistance measurement to facilitate research of conserved molecular mechanisms underlying stress resistance. C. elegans also possesses a simplified nervous system fundamental to understanding the neural basis of stress resistance. Here, we present methods of measuring stress resistance of C. elegans under four different stress conditions: heat stress, endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress, mitochondrial stress, and oxidative stress. Worm cohorts are placed on solid agar plates, and exposed to challenging temperatures for heat stress, or agar containing different doses of compounds inducing ER, mitochondrial, or oxidative stress. We have set up increasing doses of each stress and titrated the optimal dose to determine stress resistance differences in a RIC neuron-ablated strain compared to wild-type strain, as an example. Under stress conditions, C. elegans survival is monitored hourly or daily, and survival curves are plotted and compared to identify different capabilities of stress resistance in different C. elegans strains. These provide a reproducible approach for evaluating the resistance to multiple stressors over a range of doses and time scales in C. elegans of wild-type, mutants or neuron manipulated strains and also help uncover the molecular and neural mechanisms underlying multiple stressors.