Microbiome research attracts significant interest in recent years, yielding important insights into animal (and plant) interactions with the microbial world, and their reliance on microbes for fundamental processes, from development to behaviour. The studies utilizing the worm C. elegans are also gaining traction, offering insights into the role of host genes in shaping the gut microbiome and characterizing the contributions of gut microbes for host life history and fitness. C. elegans is a bacteriovore, offering opportunities for examining the relationship between environmental microbial availability and gut communities; it is transparent, permitting in vivo analysis of gut colonization by bacteria; and it is a tractable genetic model, enabling tight genetic control and facile manipulation. As this new research direction is growing in volume and in significance, it becomes increasingly necessary to share and spread methodologies, as it became apparent in a recent microbiome workshop that took place as part of the 23^rd Biennial International C. elegans Conference (UCLA, June 2021).

We propose to assemble a methods collection exploring recent methodologies developed to facilitate microbiome research C. elegans. Included will be methodologies for the isolation and microbiome characterization of worms from the wild; using compost microcosms to study the worm microbiome in emulated natural-like environments; usage of synthetic bacterial communities to simplify experimental design and microbiome analysis; and methods taking advantage of the qualities making C. elegans a popular model organism, including in vivo imaging and gene expression analyses, to interrogate the underlying cellular and molecular interactions.