# High-throughput developmental assay of cold tolerance in Caenorhabditis elegans

## TL;DR

The paper introduces a high-throughput method to study cold tolerance in C. elegans larvae, revealing genetic variation and heritability.

## Contribution

A scalable high-throughput assay for measuring cold tolerance in C. elegans during the L1 larval stage.

## Key findings

- Animals exposed to 24-hour cold treatment showed greater variation in cold tolerance.
- The assay is suitable for large-scale genetic and evolutionary studies of cold tolerance in nematodes.

## Abstract

Temperature can impose strong selection causing thermal tolerance variation between individuals, populations, and species. We developed a high-throughput larval development assay for cold tolerance in the model organism

Caenorhabditis elegans

. We exposed animals to 4°C cold treatments for either 12 or 24 hours. Animals exposed to the 24-hour cold treatment exhibited greater variation and heritability in cold tolerance during the L1 larval stage. The high-throughput approach that we developed is easily scalable to simultaneously measure a large number of strains, which makes it ideal for studying the genetics and evolution of cold tolerance in

Caenorhabditis

nematodes.