Project title
‘Dietary Restriction and Lifespan in Caenorhabditis elegans .’
Profile summary
I have been a PhD student at Canterbury Christ Church University since October 2013. I obtained my undergraduate degree in Biosciences (2013) at Canterbury Christ Church University.
Research and knowledge exchange
Ageing is of fundamental interest to humans. In recent years a new paradigm has emerged among the scientific community that ‘ageing is a curable disease’. At the present, however, not much is understood about natural variation in the underlying genetic control of ageing.
I am looking into natural variation in ageing and stress responses in Caenorhabditis elegans. Stress and lifespan are closely related, with many mutations that alter lifespan also affecting stress-response and nutrient sensing. Experiments on stress factors can therefore provide insight into the mechanisms of ageing.
The free living round worm Caenorhabditis elegans are one of the fastest, cheapest and most efficient ways to learn about ourselves. The nematode C. elegans has long become established as a standard experimental system for the investigation of great variety of biological processes: aging, sex determination, cell lineage, cell death, myogenesis and neural development and specification to name a few.
Most studies in C. elegans have been using one canonical strain, Bristol (N2) as a reference genotype. Therefore, what is needed is a closer look at the freshly derived-wild isolates in order to obtain a more realistic idea about the effects of DR and other stresses.
I work with novel 4-parental 200 recombinant inbred lines (RILs) freshly derived from the wild without the N2 strain. Several complementary approaches have been taken in this research; especially, the phenotyping of the RILs for Lifespan, Dietary restriction, Cold shock, Heat shock, Oxidative stress and Maternal hatching.
Teaching and subject expertise
Publications
Stastna J.J ., Snoek L.B., Kammenga J.E. & Harvey S.C. (2015) Genotype-dependent lifespan effects in peptone deprived Caenorhabditis elegans. Scientific reports , 5:16259. DOI:10.1038/srep16259 http:// www.nature.com/articles/srep16259
Green J.W.M., Stastna J.J ., Orbidans H.E. & Harvey S.C. (2014) Highly polygenic variation in environmental perception determines dauer larvae formation in growing populations of Caenorhabditis elegans . PLoS One , 9(11):e112830. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112830 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0112830
Snoek L.B., Orbidans H.E., Stastna J.J., Aartse A., Rodriguez M., Riksen J.A.G., Kammenga J.E. & Harvey S.C. (2014) Widespread genomic incompatibilities in Caenorhabditis elegans . G3 (Bethesda), 4:1813-1823. http://www.g3journal.org/content/4/10/1813.abstract