What is it I'm trying to figure out again?
Who says procrastination doesn’t come in handy some times? If I had tried to blog on this topic earlier in the week, I would have had to be BS my way through my entry. This isn’t to say I didn’t know what I was doing; it was more that I wasn’t as to why.
As I briefly mentioned earlier in my blogs, I am working with C. Elegans, a particularly useful model organism, one which I used to resent, but am slowly but surely growing to love.
Organisms in the wild are unable to walk to the supermarket when they get hungry, so when food availability becomes sparse, it is evolutionarily wise to have some sort of mechanism of prolonged-survival. C. Elegans are no exception. At the Baugh lab we are studying the worms’ reactions to periods of starvation.
Just as some quick background on the worms’ development—if an egg is laid and hatches in a favorable environment (i.e. with food), it progresses through four larval stages (L1-L4) before becoming a young and then gravid adult. If food is not present, the worms will go into a form of developmental arrest, L1 arrest, and will not molt and become an L2 until they have sufficient resources. If the onset of food deprivation comes later in life, the worms can go into another form of arrest, forming dauers. These dauers are long, move very little unless provoked, and have been known to live up to a year! (The normal life span of a worm is roughly 2 weeks.)
What Ilka (another undergrad) and I are doing is starving larva for variable amounts of time and looking at how well they respond and recover when exposed to food again. For me in particular, I am looking at mutant strains which lack a protein known to contribute to growth development as well as others which lack proteins necessary for dauer formation. My research question, then, is what role do these genes play in starvation recovery and what can we deduce from this knowledge?
I’ll let you know as soon as I figure it out.
