Worm Breeder's Gazette 1(2): 5a
These abstracts should not be cited in bibliographies. Material contained herein should be treated as personal communication and should be cited as such only with the consent of the author.
Nematodes can be grown conveniently in gram quantities on plates. Using the Cambridge bacterial strain, NA22 and increasing the amount of Bactopeptone in NGM media from 0.25% to 2% in 0.25 steps results in an approximately linear increase in yield on 8.5 cm diameter petri dishes. The settled volumes are 0.03 ml to 0.22 ml of worms per plate for 0.25% and 2%, respectively. N2, E675, and E190 have been grown this way. Caution: l) I can't guarantee that a single nematode would behave in this manner. All of my work has involved washing nematodes off NGM plates with M9 buffer, letting the nematodes settle, and then pipetting the nematodes onto enriched peptone plates at no more than a 10x dilution. 2) Although 2% Bactopeptone plates may not be the limit for linearity of nematode growth, a medium can be too rich. For example, 3xD plates cause nematodes to go into dauer or die.