C. elegans Lifespan & Healthspan

Lifespan assays follow a synchronized cohort of C. elegans from adulthood to death, scoring survival over time to build a Kaplan–Meier curve and derive mean, median and maximum lifespan. The worm became the premier aging model when Kenyon and colleagues (1993) showed that a single mutation in daf-2, the insulin/IGF-1 receptor ortholog, more than doubles lifespan in a manner dependent on the DAF-16/FOXO transcription factor — establishing a conserved genetic pathway for longevity that holds across species.

Modern aging research distinguishes lifespan from healthspan — the period of life spent in good functional condition. Because frailty in the worm manifests as a progressive decline in spontaneous and stimulated locomotion (and in pharyngeal feeding rate), movement-based read-outs let a single assay report both how long animals live and how well they age, a distinction central to interpreting longevity interventions.

ConductVision automates the lifespan workflow by tracking movement across the cohort over days, detecting the cessation of spontaneous and stimulated locomotion that defines death, and handling censoring for animals that bag, rupture or crawl off the plate. It builds survival curves, computes mean/median/maximum lifespan and mortality-rate slopes, and quantifies the locomotor-healthspan trajectory in parallel — removing the manual, daily prodding that makes hand-scored lifespan assays so labor-intensive.

The assay is foundational for aging genetics (for example the insulin/IGF-1–DAF-16 axis and dietary-restriction pathways), for longevity-compound screening, and for healthspan studies. Temperature, food source, and contamination control critically affect lifespan, and consistent cohort synchronization is essential; automated multi-plate imaging provides the scale and consistency that large survival screens require.