Chronobiology
Author: Osvaldo Franciso Silva | Email: fransilvaj@gmail.com
Francisco Silva 1°, Rosana Rota 1°, Eugenia Goya 2°, Diego A. Golombek 3°, María L. Migliori 1°
1° Laboratorio de Cronobiología, Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes.
2° European Institute for the Biology of Aging (ERIBA), University Medical Center Groningen, Building 3226 room 0020, Internal Zipcode FA50, Antonius Deusinglaan.
3° Laboratorio Interdisciplinario del Tiempo (LITERA), Universidad de San Andrés/CONICET
Circadian rhythms are an adaptative feature found throughout nature which enables living beings to anticipate daily variations in their environment. The nematode C. elegans is currently used as a novel model for circadian research given the array of powerful genetic and neuro-behavioral tools at disposal. The strain of C. elegans widely used in the laboratory is the N2, which is considered domesticated. Various studies show that recent isolates of C. elegans are highly divergent at a genomic level with respect to the N2 strain, due to the accumulation of numerous mutations in the latter. In this work, we use a locomotor activity recording system to circadian screen wild C. elegans isolates. Our results show that the both the N2 strain and the wild isolates were synchronized to a cold-warm (CW) cycle. MY23, JU1172, JU830 and DL238 tended to be truly entrained to the zeitgeber, while the other worm strains (especially the control N2 strain) showed varying degrees of masking. Indeed, ~30% of the N2 populations were entrained to CW cycles, increasing to 73%, 66%, 60% and 53% in the MY23, JU1172, JU830 and DL238 strains, respectively. All assayed strains retained circadian rhythms of ~24 h under constant conditions, except for JU1652 which had a period of ~23 h. Circadian characterization of wild C. elegans isolates, together with genomic data, would enable the possibility of identifying genomic regions (or even genes) involved in synchronization.