Effects of Glycosylation on Cholesterol Metabolism in Caenorhabditis elegans
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Authors
Wilson, Heather
Issue Date
2011
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
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Abstract
Transport of cholesterol within multi-cellular organisms is a vital life process.
Research with cholesterol transport and metabolism using the Caenorhabditis elegans
(C. elegans) is beneficial to the health science community because many biological
processes are conserved between C. elegans and humans. Efficient cholesterol transport
requires glycosylation, which is the modification of proteins with sugars. In nematodes,
some of the glycosylated proteins (glycoproteins), called vitellogenins, play a role in
cholesterol uptake in oocytes of C. elegans. There are a large number of glycosylation
and cholesterol transport C elegans mutants available. Furthermore C. elegans present an
unusual research advantage since they cannot synthesize cholesterol and must take it in
from their outside environment.
Since C. elegans must take in cholesterol from their outside environment, I
hypothesized that abnormal glycosylation of vitellogenins impairs the transport of
cholesterol in C. elegans. I tested this hypothesis with three approaches: quantifying
cholesterol incorporation into C. elegans oocytes, assaying viability of glycosylation
defective mutants grown under low or no sterol conditions, and comparing the total
cholesterol content of glycosylation-defective mutants vs. wildtype animals.
Through these studies, it was found that 1) srf-8 C. elegans have a significantly
different accumulation of cholesterol than wildtype worms as determined by fluorescent
cholesterol microscopy and, 2) srf-8 C. elegans have a slow hatching phenotype when
grown in no or low-cholesterol conditions.
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In Copyright(All Rights Reserved)