Reproductive Aging Investigating Mechanisms of Fat Loss in Mated Worms and Development of a Single Worm Mos1 Screen

Abstract

The reproductive system’s regulation of aging is a well documented and conserved behavior. My research uses Caenorhabditis elegans as a model to understand the mechanisms behind mating-induced fat loss as well as to a method to efficiently find novel pathways regulated by reproduction. The results from my experiments comparing Oil Red O intensity between unmated and mated worms suggest that after one day of mating, across the whole-body fat is not lost, but in mated worm fat levels are raised the germ line. The RNAi experiments indicate that knockdown of lips-17 and vit-4 in mated worms signals to upregulate other lipases to compensate for their downregulation. Furthermore the data suggests that lips-17 might play a specific role in regulating the fat metabolism of the germ line. However, none of the genes in question, lipl-2, lips-17, or vit-4, appears to be directly responsible for fat loss in mated worms.

To broaden the impact of my experiments on the understanding of reproductive aging, I also began work on developing a screen for genes responsible for regulating the health of the reproductive system. Senior members of my lab had hypothesized that the exogenous Mos1 transposon element could be used to quickly identify a large number of genes responsible for reproductive aging. To this end, I worked to modify an existing protocol to screen for the transposon so that the Mos1 element could be faithfully isolated and sequenced from a single worm. I accomplished this by incrementally increasing the amounts of DNA amplified in the two PCRs in the screen.