Effects of RNAi Feeding Experiments To Silence the lgx-1 and F48E3.8 genes of Caenorhabditis elegans.
Brand, Kenneth J.
2011
- Lymphatic filariasis affects a large area of the world and current preventative therapies are unable to control and eradicate it. Both ivermectin and DEC, the current drug treatments, are becoming less desirable because of an increased resistance by adult female worms and harmful side effects to human hosts, respectively (Babu et al., 2006; Osei-Atweneboana et al., 2011). The structural polymer, ... read morechitin, is found in the filarial nematodes that cause elephantiasis as well as in the free living nematode C. elegans (Harris et al., 2000; Zhang, Foster, Nelson, Ma, & Carlow, 2005). By studying the effects of chitin modification in C. elegans, new preventative methods of lymphatic filariasis may emerge. This paper looked at the resulting changes to development and surviving progeny of silencing the lgx-1 and F48E3.8 genes, both of which encode putative chitin deacetylase catalytic regions, in C. elegans through RNAi feeding experiments. Experiments silencing just the lgx-1 gene showed a developmental delay while having no effect on brood size. Silencing both chitin deacetylase genes shows a combined effect of retarded development as well as a significant decrease in mean brood size. Silencing the lgx-1 gene, expressed in the pharynx, may prevent complete elongation of the feeding organ resulting in a slower distribution of nutrients to the growing worm. The decrease in fertility seen by knocking down the F48E3.8 gene indicates that the conversion to chitosan is crucial in the control of pharyngeal elongation in developing embryos or ability to hatch from eggshells.read less
- ID:
- g445cr58q
- Component ID:
- tufts:UA005.010.060.00001
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- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
