The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) has proven to be a powerful model organism for the study of many biological processes, with major implications for human health and disease. As progranulin is a pleiotropic, secreted protein with both cell autonomous and non-autonomous roles, a multicellular organism such as C. elegans is ideal for the investigation of its normal function and pathological effects. The C. elegans genome contains a progranulin-like gene known as pgrn-1. The nematode pgrn-1 encodes a protein with three cysteine-rich granulin domains, compared to the seven and a half granulins in the human protein. We have shown that C. elegans mutants lacking pgrn-1 appear grossly normal, but exhibit accelerated apoptotic cell engulfment as well as a stress resistance phenotype (Kao et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 108:4441–4446, 2011; Judy et al., PLoS Genet 9:e1003714, 2013). In addition, the roles of individual granulins can also be dissected in C. elegans (Salazar et al., J Neurosci 35:9315–9328, 2015). Here, we describe methods for studying apoptosis and stress response in C. elegans.
CITATION STYLE
Hsu, T. Y., Butler, V. J., & Kao, A. W. (2018). The use of Caenorhabditis elegans to study progranulin in the regulation of programmed cell death and stress response. In Methods in Molecular Biology (Vol. 1806, pp. 193–206). Humana Press Inc. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-8559-3_14
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