Abstract
Planaria, particularly Schmidtea mediterranea and Dugesia japonica, are now established as research organisms in many laboratories across the life sciences community. Planarians are cheap and easy to keep in the lab. This chapter provides techniques and guidelines for establishing and maintaining a planarian colony. We provide sections on food preparation, housing, feeding, cleaning, culture expansion by amputation, and recognizing and responding to culture problems.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to acknowledge Phil Newmark, particularly for authoring the original planarian care protocol, upon which much of the content provided in this chapter rests. Bret Pearson and Peter Reddien also graciously shared their lab’s protocols. We would also like to thank the Planaria Core staff of the Aquatics Facility at the Stowers Institute for their daily efforts in providing for our colony.
Planarian research at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research is supported by the Stowers Institute, The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the National Institutes of Health National Institute of General Medical Sciences R37GM057260.
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Merryman, M.S., Alvarado, A.S., Jenkin, J.C. (2018). Culturing Planarians in the Laboratory. In: Rink, J. (eds) Planarian Regeneration. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1774. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7802-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7802-1_5
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