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Caenorhabditis elegans is a free-living transparent nematode about 1 mm in length that lives in temperate soil environments. It is the type species of its genus. The name is a blend of the Greek caeno- (recent), rhabditis (rod-like) and Latin elegans (elegant). In 1900, Maupas initially named it Rhabditides elegans. Osche placed it in the subgenus Caenorhabditis in 1952, and in 1955, Dougherty raised Caenorhabditis to the status of genus.
Schizosaccharomyces pombe, also called "fission yeast", is a species of yeast used in traditional brewing and as a model organism in molecular and cell biology. It is a unicellular eukaryote, whose cells are rod-shaped. Cells typically measure 3 to 4 micrometres in diameter and 7 to 14 micrometres in length. Its genome, which is approximately 14.1 million base pairs, is estimated to contain 4,970 protein-coding genes and at least 450 non-coding RNAs.
Sydney Brenner was a South African biologist. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and Sir John E. Sulston. Brenner made significant contributions to work on the genetic code, and other areas of molecular biology while working in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He established the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of developmental biology, and founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, United States.
Leland Harrison (Lee) Hartwell is former president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division (duplication) of cells.
Howard Robert Horvitz ForMemRS NAS AAA&S APS NAM is an American biologist best known for his research on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, whose "seminal discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death" were "important for medical research and have shed new light on the pathogenesis of many diseases".
Sir Paul Maxime Nurse is an English geneticist, former President of the Royal Society and Chief Executive and Director of the Francis Crick Institute. He was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Leland Hartwell and Tim Hunt for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells in the cell cycle.
Mitochondrial 5-demethoxyubiquinone hydroxylase, also known as coenzyme Q7, hydroxylase, is an enzyme that in humans is encoded by the COQ7 gene. The clk-1 (clock-1) gene encodes this protein that is necessary for ubiquinone biosynthesis in the worm Caenorhabditis elegans and other eukaryotes. The mouse version of the gene is called mclk-1 and the human, fruit fly and yeast homolog COQ7.
Kim Ashley Nasmyth is an English geneticist, the Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, former scientific director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), and former head of the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford. He is best known for his work on the segregation of chromosomes during cell division.
Cdc25 is a dual-specificity phosphatase first isolated from the yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe as a cell cycle defective mutant. As with other cell cycle proteins or genes such as Cdc2 and Cdc4, the "cdc" in its name refers to "cell division control". Dual-specificity phosphatases are considered a sub-class of protein tyrosine phosphatases. By removing inhibitory phosphate residues from target cyclin-dependent kinases (Cdks), Cdc25 proteins control entry into and progression through various phases of the cell cycle, including mitosis and S ("Synthesis") phase.
Spo11 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the SPO11 gene. Spo11, in a complex with mTopVIB, creates double strand breaks to initiate meiotic recombination. Its active site contains a tyrosine which ligates and dissociates with DNA to promote break formation. One Spo11 protein is involved per strand of DNA, thus two Spo11 proteins are involved in each double stranded break event.
Most animal testing involves invertebrates, especially Drosophila melanogaster, a fruit fly, and Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode. These animals offer scientists many advantages over vertebrates, including their short life cycle, simple anatomy and the ease with which large numbers of individuals may be studied. Invertebrates are often cost-effective, as thousands of flies or nematodes can be housed in a single room.
Gary Bruce Ruvkun is an American molecular biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Ruvkun discovered the mechanism by which lin-4, the first microRNA (miRNA) discovered by Victor Ambros, regulates the translation of target messenger RNAs via imperfect base-pairing to those targets, and discovered the second miRNA, let-7, and that it is conserved across animal phylogeny, including in humans. These miRNA discoveries revealed a new world of RNA regulation at an unprecedented small size scale, and the mechanism of that regulation. Ruvkun also discovered many features of insulin-like signaling in the regulation of aging and metabolism. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans was first studied in the laboratory by Victor Nigon and Ellsworth Dougherty in the 1940s, but came to prominence after being adopted by Sydney Brenner in 1963 as a model organism for the study of developmental biology using genetics. In 1974, Brenner published the results of his first genetic screen, which isolated hundreds of mutants with morphological and functional phenotypes, such as being uncoordinated. In the 1980s, John Sulston and co-workers identified the lineage of all 959 cells in the adult hermaphrodite, the first genes were cloned, and the physical map began to be constructed. In 1998, the worm became the first multi-cellular organism to have its genome sequenced. Notable research using C. elegans includes the discoveries of caspases, RNA interference, and microRNAs. Six scientists have won the Nobel prize for their work on C. elegans.
Epistasis refers to genetic interactions in which the mutation of one gene masks the phenotypic effects of a mutation at another locus. Systematic analysis of these epistatic interactions can provide insight into the structure and function of genetic pathways. Examining the phenotypes resulting from pairs of mutations helps in understanding how the function of these genes intersects. Genetic interactions are generally classified as either Positive/Alleviating or Negative/Aggravating. Fitness epistasis is positive when a loss of function mutation of two given genes results in exceeding the fitness predicted from individual effects of deleterious mutations, and it is negative when it decreases fitness. Ryszard Korona and Lukas Jasnos showed that the epistatic effect is usually positive in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Usually, even in case of positive interactions double mutant has smaller fitness than single mutants. The positive interactions occur often when both genes lie within the same pathway Conversely, negative interactions are characterized by an even stronger defect than would be expected in the case of two single mutations, and in the most extreme cases the double mutation is lethal. This aggravated phenotype arises when genes in compensatory pathways are both knocked out.
DAF-16 is the sole ortholog of the FOXO family of transcription factors in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. It is responsible for activating genes involved in longevity, lipogenesis, heat shock survival and oxidative stress responses. It also protects C.elegans during food deprivation, causing it to transform into a hibernation - like state, known as a Dauer. DAF-16 is notable for being the primary transcription factor required for the profound lifespan extension observed upon mutation of the insulin-like receptor DAF-2. The gene has played a large role in research into longevity and the insulin signalling pathway as it is located in C. elegans, a successful ageing model organism.
In molecular biology mir-84 microRNA is a short RNA molecule. MicroRNAs function to regulate the expression levels of other genes by several mechanisms.
Genetics of aging is generally concerned with life extension associated with genetic alterations, rather than with accelerated aging diseases leading to reduction in lifespan.
Julie Ann Ahringer is an American/British Professor of Genetics and Genomics, Director of the Gurdon Institute and a member of the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. She leads a research lab investigating the control of gene expression.
Robin Campbell Allshire is Professor of Chromosome Biology at University of Edinburgh and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. His research group at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology focuses on the epigenetic mechanisms governing the assembly of specialised domains of chromatin and their transmission through cell division.
Paul W. Sternberg is an American biologist. He does research for WormBase on C. elegans, a model organism.
References
- 1 2 "Dr Alison Woollard: 'I've got the performing bug'". The Independent. 22 December 2013. Archived from the original on 31 December 2013.
- 1 2 3 "The Royal Institution of Great Britain | Dr Alison Woollard explores the frontiers of developmental biology in the 2013 CHRISTMAS LECTURES". Archived from the original on 14 August 2013.
- ↑ Alison Woollard's publications in Google Scholar
- ↑ Alison Woollard publications indexed by Microsoft Academic
- ↑ Alison Woollard's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
- ↑ Woollard, Alison (1995). Cell cycle control in fission yeast (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford.
- ↑ "Alison Woollard on what she has learnt from mutant worms, The Life Scientific - BBC Radio 4". BBC.
- ↑ Woollard, A.; Hodgkin, J. (2000). "The caenorhabditis elegans fate-determining gene mab-9 encodes a T-box protein required to pattern the posterior hindgut". Genes & Development. 14 (5): 596–603. doi:10.1101/gad.14.5.596. PMC 316422 . PMID 10716947.
- ↑ Hayles, J.; Fisher, D.; Woollard, A.; Nurse, P. (1994). "Temporal order of S phase and mitosis in fission yeast is determined by the state of the p34cdc2-mitotic B cyclin complex". Cell. 78 (5): 813–822. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(94)90542-8. PMID 8087848. S2CID 7449103.
- ↑ Chang, F.; Woollard, A.; Nurse, P. (1996). "Isolation and characterization of fission yeast mutants defective in the assembly and placement of the contractile actin ring". Journal of Cell Science. 109 (1): 131–142. doi:10.1242/jcs.109.1.131. PMID 8834798.
- ↑ Appleford, P. J.; Woollard, A. (2009). "RUNX genes find a niche in stem cell biology". Journal of Cellular Biochemistry. 108 (1): 14–21. doi:10.1002/jcb.22249. PMID 19562739. S2CID 35703786.
- ↑ Newbury, S.; Woollard, A. (2004). "The 5'-3' exoribonuclease xrn-1 is essential for ventral epithelial enclosure during C. Elegans embryogenesis". RNA. 10 (1): 59–65. doi:10.1261/rna.2195504. PMC 1370518 . PMID 14681585.
- ↑ "Support for Public Engagement | University of Oxford". www.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 28 April 2021.
- ↑ "Prof. Alison Woollard appointed as Academic Champion for Public Engagement with Research". www.bioch.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 28 April 2021.
- ↑ Woollard, Alison; Gilbert, Sophie. "Tales from the lobster tank". RIGB. Retrieved 17 November 2016.
- ↑ Sample, Ian (5 August 2013). "Christmas lectures will address ethical challenges posed by genetics". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 November 2016.
- ↑ "The Life Scientific: Alison Woollard". www.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 30 April 2021.
