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The Use of Caenorhabditis elegans to Study Progranulin in the Regulation of Programmed Cell Death and Stress Response

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Progranulin

Part of the book series: Methods in Molecular Biology ((MIMB,volume 1806))

Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by grants from the NIH R21 NS082709, Consortium for Frontotemporal Dementia (CFR), Tau Consortium and Hellman Family Foundation to AWK. For strains, we thank Kaveh Ashrafi (UCSF), Cynthia Kenyon (UCSF), the Mitani Laboratory at the Tokyo Women’s Medical University (Tokyo, Japan), and the C. elegans Genetic Center (CGC), which is funded by NIH Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (P40 OD010440).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurology, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Tsung-Yuan Hsu, Victoria J. Butler & Aimee W. Kao

Authors
  1. Tsung-Yuan Hsu
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  2. Victoria J. Butler
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  3. Aimee W. Kao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aimee W. Kao .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medicine, McGill University MUHC, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Andrew Bateman

  2. Department of Medicine, McGill University MUHC, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Hugh P.J. Bennett

  3. Department of Surgery, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Siu Tim Cheung

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Hsu, TY., 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: Bateman, A., Bennett, H., Cheung, S. (eds) Progranulin. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1806. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-8559-3_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-8559-3_14

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  • Publisher Name: Humana Press, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-8557-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-8559-3

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