Caenorhabditis elegans is an excellent model for high-throughput experimental approaches, but lacks a robust, versatile and automated means to pinpoint time of death. Here we describe an automated, label-free, high-throughput method using death-associated fluorescence to monitor nematode survival, which we apply to stress and infection resistance assays. We demonstrate its use to define correlations between age, longevity and stress-resistance, and reveal an autophagy-dependent increase in acute stress resistance in early adulthood.

LFASS: Label-Free Automated Survival Scoring for High-Throughput Nematode Assays