Wounding Caenorhabditis elegans with Glass Wool

Abstract

Research on wound healing majorly relies on rat, mice and other animal models. However, an alternative animal model ought to be brought in the field, pertaining to the stringent ethical issues owing to the use of animals in research. In this regard, Caenorhabdits elegans, a miniature model nematode gains the great attention of the researchers in wound healing. Though, the model is being explored in wound research for more than a decade, the existing protocols lack the acquisition of large wound population that in turn could enable the utility of global genomics (G), proteomics (P) and metabolomics (M) based approaches. In order to overcome the inadequacy of the existing protocols, the protocol described here affords the acquisition of voluminous wound population in C. elegans using truncated glasswool pieces to enable the utility of high throughput analytical techniques. Graphic abstract: Steps involved in glass wool wounding protocol.

Keywords: Alternative animal model; C. elegans; High throughput analytical techniques; Large wound population; Truncated glass wool pieces.