Chronobiology
Author: Victoria Ambrosino | Email: ambrovicky@hotmail.com
Victoria Ambrosino 1°, Melisa Lamberti 1°, María L. Migliori1 1°, Diego Golombek 2°, Rosana Rota 1°
1° 1Laboratorio de Cronobiología, Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes
2° 2Laboratorio Interdisciplinario del Tiempo (LITERA), Universidad de San Andrés/CONICET.
Circadian rhythms are based on endogenous clocks that allow organisms to regulate their daily behavior,physiology and metabolism. Such rhythms are modulated by external signals and can be synchronized bylight and temperature cycles.The biological clock in C. elegans has not been completely characterized at the molecular level. However,some proteins have been described in the nematode as putative homologs to the mammalian/fly core clock genes.In this work, we generated a transgenic line of C.elegans(DG11 strain) with the luciferase reporter psur-5::luc::gfp (to record luminescence in vivo) and permeable to neuronal RNAi treatment. We did not find any significant differences in either period or synchronization in the DG 11 strain compared to the control strainunder the cold-warm(CW) cycle(89.4 vs. 92.3% of synchronized populations, respectively).Both strains retained circadian rhythms of ~25 h under constant conditions.RNAi is extensively used to study C. Elegans gene functions;in this sense, the DG11 strain will allow us to carry out RNAi feeding experiments to study the role of genes homologous to the central clock of flies and mammals(such as lin-42, aha-1 and kin-20) through the inhibition of their expression in neurons.The development of this strain will allow us to advance the studies of the molecular bases involved in the central pacemaker of the C. elegansclock, turning it into a novel model organism for the study of diseases due to alterations of the circadian cycle.