Project description:OBJECTIVES:Tumour cell proliferation requires high metabolism to meet the bioenergetics and biosynthetic needs. Dauer in Caenorhabditis elegans is characterized by lower metabolism, and we established an approach with C elegans to find potential tumour therapy targets. MATERIALS AND METHODS:RNAi screening was used to find dauer-related genes, and these genes were further analysed in glp-1(-) mutants for tumour-suppressing testing. The identified tumour-related genes were verified in clinical tumour tissues. RESULTS:The lifespan of glp-1(-) mutants was found to be extended by classical dauer formation signalling. Then, 61 of 287 kinase-coding genes in Caenorhabditis elegans were identified as dauer-related genes, of which 27 were found to be homologous to human oncogenes. Furthermore, 12 dauer-related genes were randomly selected for tumour-suppressing test, and six genes significantly extended the lifespan of glp-1(-) mutants. Of these six genes, F47D12.9, W02B12.12 and gcy-21 were newly linked to dauer formation. These three new dauer-related genes significantly suppressed tumour cell proliferation and thus extended the lifespan of glp-1(-) mutants in a longevity- or dauer-independent manner. The mRNA expression profiles indicated that these dauer-related genes trigged similar low metabolism pattern in glp-1(-) mutants. Notably, the expression of homolog gene DCAF4L2/F47D12.9, TSSK6/W02B12.12 and NPR1/gcy-21 was found to be higher in glioma compared with adjacent normal tissue. In addition, the high expression of TSSK6/W02B12.12 and NPR1/gcy-21 correlated with a worse survival in glioma patients. CONCLUSIONS:Dauer gene screening in combination with tumour-suppressing test in glp-1(-) mutants provided a useful approach to find potential targets for tumour therapy via suppressing tumour cell proliferation and rewiring tumour cell metabolism.
Project description:When Caenorhabditis elegans senses dauer pheromone (daumone), signaling inadequate growth conditions, it enters the dauer state, which is capable of long-term survival. However, the molecular pathway of dauer entry in C. elegans has remained elusive. To systematically monitor changes in gene expression in dauer paths, we used a DNA microarray containing 22,625 gene probes corresponding to 22,150 unique genes from C. elegans. We employed two different paths: direct exposure to daumone (Path 1) and normal growth media plus liquid culture (Path 2). Our data reveal that entry into dauer is accomplished through the multi-step process, which appears to be compartmentalized in time and according to metabolic flux. That is, a time-course of dauer entry in Path 1 shows that dauer larvae formation begins at post-embryonic stage S4 (48 h) and is complete at S6 (72 h). Our results also suggest the presence of a unique adaptive metabolic control mechanism that requires both stage-specific expression of specific genes and tight regulation of different modes of fuel metabolite utilization to sustain the energy balance in the context of prolonged survival under adverse growth conditions. It is apparent that worms entering dauer stage may rely heavily on carbohydrate-based energy reserves, whereas dauer larvae utilize fat or glyoxylate cycle-based energy sources. We created a comprehensive web-based dauer metabolic database for C. elegans (www.DauerDB.org) that makes it possible to search any gene and compare its relative expression at a specific stage, or evaluate overall patterns of gene expression in both paths. This database can be accessed by the research community and could be widely applicable to other related nematodes as a molecular atlas.
Project description:BACKGROUND: An organism can respond to changing environmental conditions by adjusting gene regulation and by forming alternative phenotypes. In nematodes, these mechanisms are coupled because many species will form dauer larvae, a stress-resistant and non-aging developmental stage, when exposed to unfavorable environmental conditions, and execute gene expression programs that have been selected for the survival of the animal in the wild. These dauer larvae represent an environmentally induced, homologous developmental stage across many nematode species, sharing conserved morphological and physiological properties. Hence it can be expected that some core components of the associated transcriptional program would be conserved across species, while others might diverge over the course of evolution. However, transcriptional and metabolic analysis of dauer development has been largely restricted to Caenorhabditis elegans. Here, we use a transcriptomic approach to compare the dauer stage in the evolutionary model system Pristionchus pacificus with the dauer stage in C. elegans. RESULTS: We have employed Agilent microarrays, which represent 20,446 P. pacificus and 20,143 C. elegans genes to show an unexpected divergence in the expression profiles of these two nematodes in dauer and dauer exit samples. P. pacificus and C. elegans differ in the dynamics and function of genes that are differentially expressed. We find that only a small number of orthologous gene pairs show similar expression pattern in the dauers of the two species, while the non-orthologous fraction of genes is a major contributor to the active transcriptome in dauers. Interestingly, many of the genes acquired by horizontal gene transfer and orphan genes in P. pacificus, are differentially expressed suggesting that these genes are of evolutionary and functional importance. CONCLUSION: Our data set provides a catalog for future functional investigations and indicates novel insight into evolutionary mechanisms. We discuss the limited conservation of core developmental and transcriptional programs as a common aspect of animal evolution.
Project description:Caenorhabditis elegans is a powerful model to study metabolism and how it relates to nutrition, gene expression, and life history traits. However, while numerous experimental techniques that enable perturbation of its diet and gene function are available, a high-quality metabolic network model has been lacking. Here, we reconstruct an initial version of the C. elegans metabolic network. This network model contains 1,273 genes, 623 enzymes, and 1,985 metabolic reactions and is referred to as iCEL1273. Using flux balance analysis, we show that iCEL1273 is capable of representing the conversion of bacterial biomass into C. elegans biomass during growth and enables the predictions of gene essentiality and other phenotypes. In addition, we demonstrate that gene expression data can be integrated with the model by comparing metabolic rewiring in dauer animals versus growing larvae. iCEL1273 is available at a dedicated website (wormflux.umassmed.edu) and will enable the unraveling of the mechanisms by which different macro- and micronutrients contribute to the animal's physiology.
Project description:Although developmental timing of gene expression is used to infer potential gene function, studies have yet to correlate this information between species. We analyzed 10,921 ESTs in 3311 clusters from first- and infective third-stage larva (L1, L3i) of the parasitic nematode Strongyloides stercoralis and compared the results to Caenorhabditis elegans, a species that has an L3i-like dauer stage. In the comparison of S. stercoralis clusters with stage-specific expression to C. elegans homologs expressed in either dauer or nondauer stages, matches between S. stercoralis L1 and C. elegans nondauer-expressed genes dominated, suggesting conservation in the repertoire of genes expressed during growth in nutrient-rich conditions. For example, S. stercoralis collagen transcripts were abundant in L1 but not L3i, a pattern consistent with C. elegans collagens. Although a greater proportion of S. stercoralis L3i than L1 genes have homologs among the C. elegans dauer-specific transcripts, we did not uncover evidence of a robust conserved L3i/dauer 'expression signature.' Strikingly, in comparisons of S. stercoralis clusters to C. elegans homologs with RNAi knockouts, those with significant L1-specific expression were more than twice as likely as L3i-specific clusters to match genes with phenotypes. We also provide functional classifications of S. stercoralis clusters.
Project description:Yilmaz2016 - Genome scale metabolic model -
Caenorhabditis elegans (iCEL1273)
This model is described in the article:
A Caenorhabditis elegans
Genome-Scale Metabolic Network Model.
Yilmaz LS, Walhout AJ.
Cell Syst 2016 May; 2(5): 297-311
Abstract:
Caenorhabditis elegans is a powerful model to study
metabolism and how it relates to nutrition, gene expression,
and life history traits. However, while numerous experimental
techniques that enable perturbation of its diet and gene
function are available, a high-quality metabolic network model
has been lacking. Here, we reconstruct an initial version of
the C. elegans metabolic network. This network model
contains 1,273 genes, 623 enzymes, and 1,985 metabolic
reactions and is referred to as iCEL1273. Using flux balance
analysis, we show that iCEL1273 is capable of representing the
conversion of bacterial biomass into C. elegans biomass
during growth and enables the predictions of gene essentiality
and other phenotypes. In addition, we demonstrate that gene
expression data can be integrated with the model by comparing
metabolic rewiring in dauer animals versus growing larvae.
iCEL1273 is available at a dedicated website
(wormflux.umassmed.edu) and will enable the unraveling of the
mechanisms by which different macro- and micronutrients
contribute to the animal's physiology.
This model is hosted on
BioModels Database
and identified by:
MODEL1604210000.
To cite BioModels Database, please use:
BioModels Database:
An enhanced, curated and annotated resource for published
quantitative kinetic models.
To the extent possible under law, all copyright and related or
neighbouring rights to this encoded model have been dedicated to
the public domain worldwide. Please refer to
CC0
Public Domain Dedication for more information.
Project description:BACKGROUND: The free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans makes a developmental decision based on environmental conditions: larvae either arrest as dauer larva, or continue development into reproductive adults. There is natural variation among C. elegans lines in the sensitivity of this decision to environmental conditions; that is, there is variation in the phenotypic plasticity of dauer larva development. We hypothesised that these differences may be transcriptionally controlled in early stage larvae. We investigated this by microarray analysis of different C. elegans lines under different environmental conditions, specifically the presence and absence of dauer larva-inducing pheromone. RESULTS: There were substantial transcriptional differences between four C. elegans lines under the same environmental conditions. The expression of approximately 2,000 genes differed between genetically different lines, with each line showing a largely line-specific transcriptional profile. The expression of genes that are markers of larval moulting suggested that the lines may be developing at different rates. The expression of a total of 89 genes was putatively affected by dauer larva or non-dauer larva-inducing conditions. Among the upstream regions of these genes there was an over-representation of DAF-16-binding motifs. CONCLUSION: Under the same environmental conditions genetically different lines of C. elegans had substantial transcriptional differences. This variation may be due to differences in the developmental rates of the lines. Different environmental conditions had a rather smaller effect on transcription. The preponderance of DAF-16-binding motifs upstream of these genes was consistent with these genes playing a key role in the decision between development into dauer or into non-dauer larvae. There was little overlap between the genes whose expression was affected by environmental conditions and previously identified loci involved in the plasticity of dauer larva development.
Project description:The soybean cyst nematode Heterodera glycines is the most important parasite in soybean production worldwide. A comprehensive analysis of large-scale gene expression changes throughout the development of plant-parasitic nematodes has been lacking to date.We report an extensive genomic analysis of H. glycines, beginning with the generation of 20,100 expressed sequence tags (ESTs). In-depth analysis of these ESTs plus approximately 1,900 previously published sequences predicted 6,860 unique H. glycines genes and allowed a classification by function using InterProScan. Expression profiling of all 6,860 genes throughout the H. glycines life cycle was undertaken using the Affymetrix Soybean Genome Array GeneChip. Our data sets and results represent a comprehensive resource for molecular studies of H. glycines. Demonstrating the power of this resource, we were able to address whether arrested development in the Caenorhabditis elegans dauer larva and the H. glycines infective second-stage juvenile (J2) exhibits shared gene expression profiles. We determined that the gene expression profiles associated with the C. elegans dauer pathway are not uniformly conserved in H. glycines and that the expression profiles of genes for metabolic enzymes of C. elegans dauer larvae and H. glycines infective J2 are dissimilar.Our results indicate that hallmark gene expression patterns and metabolism features are not shared in the developmentally arrested life stages of C. elegans and H. glycines, suggesting that developmental arrest in these two nematode species has undergone more divergent evolution than previously thought and pointing to the need for detailed genomic analyses of individual parasite species.
Project description:In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the appropriate induction of dauer larvae development within growing populations is likely to be a primary determinant of genotypic fitness. The underlying genetic architecture of natural genetic variation in dauer formation has, however, not been thoroughly investigated. Here, we report extensive natural genetic variation in dauer larvae development within growing populations across multiple wild isolates. Moreover, bin mapping of introgression lines (ILs) derived from the genetically divergent isolates N2 and CB4856 reveals 10 quantitative trait loci (QTLs) affecting dauer formation. Comparison of individual ILs to N2 identifies an additional eight QTLs, and sequential IL analysis reveals six more QTLs. Our results also show that a behavioural, laboratory-derived, mutation controlled by the neuropeptide Y receptor homolog npr-1 can affect dauer larvae development in growing populations. These findings illustrate the complex genetic architecture of variation in dauer larvae formation in C. elegans and may help to understand how the control of variation in dauer larvae development has evolved.
Project description:The ascarosides form a family of small molecules that have been isolated from cultures of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. They are often referred to as "dauer pheromones" because most of them induce formation of long-lived and highly stress resistant dauer larvae. More recent studies have shown that ascarosides serve additional functions as social signals and mating pheromones. Thus, ascarosides have multiple functions. Until now, it has been generally assumed that ascarosides are constitutively expressed during nematode development.Cultures of C. elegans were developmentally synchronized on controlled diets. Ascarosides released into the media, as well as stored internally, were quantified by LC/MS. We found that ascaroside biosynthesis and release were strongly dependent on developmental stage and diet. The male attracting pheromone was verified to be a blend of at least four ascarosides, and peak production of the two most potent mating pheromone components, ascr#3 and asc#8 immediately preceded or coincided with the temporal window for mating. The concentration of ascr#2 increased under starvation conditions and peaked during dauer formation, strongly supporting ascr#2 as the main population density signal (dauer pheromone). After dauer formation, ascaroside production largely ceased and dauer larvae did not release any ascarosides. These findings show that both total ascaroside production and the relative proportions of individual ascarosides strongly correlate with these compounds' stage-specific biological functions.Ascaroside expression changes with development and environmental conditions. This is consistent with multiple functions of these signaling molecules. Knowledge of such differential regulation will make it possible to associate ascaroside production to gene expression profiles (transcript, protein or enzyme activity) and help to determine genetic pathways that control ascaroside biosynthesis. In conjunction with findings from previous studies, our results show that the pheromone system of C. elegans mimics that of insects in many ways, suggesting that pheromone signaling in C. elegans may exhibit functional homology also at the sensory level. In addition, our results provide a strong foundation for future behavioral modeling studies.