cans of worms?

[Jeffrey Yuan]

In message <9408291954.AA22061 at phage.cshl.org> Michael Hengartner writes:
> Dear worm netters,
> 
> Some friend of mine, a biochemist (who requested anonymity for fear of
> becoming the laughingstock of this discussion group), recently started
> doing some worm biochemistry.  A quite laudable enterprise, actually.
> Unfortunaly, he soon tired of having to prepare gram quantities of worms
> everytime he wanted to start some experiment, and asked me to find out if
> there is a source of worms out there, where one could simply send a PO and
> get back frozen worms.  Does something like this exist?
> 
> If not, he begged me to at the very least find a source of worm food i.e.
> large quantities of frozen E. coli for sale.  Any ideas about who would
> sell bugs cheap?  Sigma sells some lyophilized strains, but they looked
> rather pricey.
> 
> thanks for the help.
> 
> 
> _____________________________
> Michael O. Hengartner, Ph.D.
> 
> Staff Investigator                      TEL: (516) 367-8404
> Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory           LAB: (516) 367-8424
> 1 Bungtown Road                         FAX: (516) 367-8454
> Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724, USA       Email: mir at cshl.org
> 

Yes, your friend is quite a noble person to do biochemistry on worms.  Once a 
upon a time, I also did some biochemistry on worms and also found getting large 
quantities of worms to be troublesome.  However, I did speak to several people 
at Merck in Jim Schaeffer's group (he is in the gazette) who actively do 
biochemistry on C. elegans to find out how they got large quantities of worms.  
They used a 300 liter fermenter (!!!) to grow up large batches of worms.  
However, to seed the fermenter they started out with over 14 liters of just 
starved liquid cultures ( not a trivial task in itself).  Anyway, people in Jim 
Schaeffer's group might be of assistance.  If your friend (or anyone else) has 
any questions (or secrets) on how to grow large batches of worms I would love to
hear about them and will post any bits of info to the Net.


Jeffrey Yuan  

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*  Jeffrey Yuan                                                          *
*  Department of Molecular Biology                                       *
*  Lewis Thomas Laboratory                                               *
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*  Princeton, NJ  08544              email: yuan at phoenix.princeton.edu   *
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