Project description:Understanding genome and gene function in a whole organism requires us to fully comprehend the life cycle and the physiology of the organism in question. Caenorhabditis elegans XX animals are hermaphrodites that exhaust their sperm after 3 d of egg-laying. Even though C. elegans can live for many days after cessation of egg-laying, the molecular physiology of this state has not been as intensely studied as other parts of the life cycle, despite documented changes in behavior and metabolism. To study the effects of sperm depletion and aging of C. elegans during the first 6 d of adulthood, we measured the transcriptomes of first-day adult hermaphrodites and sixth-day sperm-depleted adults, and, at the same time points, mutant fog-2(lf) worms that have a feminized germline phenotype. We found that we could separate the effects of biological aging from sperm depletion. For a large subset of genes, young adult fog-2(lf) animals had the same gene expression changes as sperm-depleted sixth-day wild-type hermaphrodites, and these genes did not change expression when fog-2(lf) females reached the sixth day of adulthood. Taken together, this indicates that changing sperm status causes a change in the internal state of the worm, which we call the female-like state. Our data provide a high-quality picture of the changes that happen in global gene expression throughout the period of early aging in the worm.
Project description:In this experiment, steady-state mRNA levels were determined for replicated samples of N2 (wild-type reference) and fog-2(q71) homozygous mutant C. elegans. All samples were adult XX animals, which for N2 are self-fertile hermaphrodites and for fog-2(q71) spermless hermaphrodites, i.e. true females. For the fog-2 mutant animals, only those that had mated with males, and were thus gravid, were picked for RNA isolation. This ensures that all comparisons are between similar, embryo-containing animals. The experiment was motivated by the role of FOG-2 in post-transcriptional control of gene expression in germ cells, inferred from its the germline-specific phenotype of its loss and from its physical associated with the GLD-1 RNA-binding protein. Specifically, a possible role for FOG-2 in influencing mRNA stability was addressed.
Project description:Recent work has shown that small non-coding RNAs, including miRNAs, serve an important role in controlling gene expression during development and disease. However, little detailed information exists concerning the relative expression patterns of small RNAs during development of C. elegans. Here we use recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technology to show that expression of non-coding small RNAs, including miRNAs, changes dynamically during development and in the different sexes of C. elegans; approximately 16% of known miRNAs changed over 10 fold in expression during C. elegans development and about 12% of miRNAs showed major changes in expression between males and hermaphrodites of C. elegans. These results should lead to a better understanding of the expression and function of small RNAs in C. elegans development. For data usage terms and conditions, please refer to http://www.genome.gov/27528022 and http://www.genome.gov/Pages/Research/ENCODE/ENCODEDataReleasePolicyFinal2008.pdf Examination of small RNA expression in six different developmental stages of hermaphrodites (Embryo, mid-L1, mid-L2, mid-L3, mid-L4, young adult), and young adult males (dpy-28;him-8) and spermatogenesis-defective young adult hermaphrodites (spe-9). The number of sequence reads for miRNA was assessed from the raw sequence data from Solexa sequencing using perfect sequence matching to known miRNAs (miRBase Release 11.0).