We developed a cooling device that can easily immobilize large populations of C. elegans on their original plates with minimal user effort. You simply place your plate on the stage and all worms on the plate are cooled and immobilized. We quantified worm movement at different temperatures. Surprisingly, we found that warmer temperatures, like 6℃,  can immobilize worms much better than colder temperatures, like 1 to  2℃ With  6℃ cooling, we were able to strongly immobilize worms for imaging. We measured time spent on an imaging experiment, using either chemical or [our] cooling immobilization. Chemical methods involve a lot of time processing animals and slides. Cooling saves at least 98% of that time. Cooling also allows us to manipulate worms on the plate while they are immobilized, which could be very useful for screening.

iScience Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2023.105999 

Github page: https://github.com/wormneurolab/Cooling-Stage

Discussion: https://github.com/wormneurolab/Cooling-Stage/discussions