Presenter(s): Haley Rice
Co Presenter(s): Faryn Dahlen, Victoria Dang, Cindy Le, Yalin Li, Jack Lien, Tawny Nguyen, Hanson Pham
Poster 42
Session: Sciences
All organisms experience various stressors in their environments. Model organisms provide a powerful opportunity to investigate the mechanisms by which organisms cope with these challenges. In the nematode model C. elegans, daf-16 is a global stress regulator. Our research focused on testing the role of daf-16 in the organismal response to alcohol exposure to understand the function of this gene. C. elegans with the daf-16 mutation have a reduced ability to respond to stressful environments. We predicted that daf-16 mutants would be less able to respond to ethanol, resulting in lower survival compared to wild-type. We sought to determine whether daf-16 mutants are able to respond to alcohol in a manner comparable to wild-type. After incubation in a weak ethanol solution, we exposed groups of wild-type or daf-16 worms to either acute alcohol stress (10% EtOH; treatment) or to a buffer (control). After five minutes, we counted the number of alive and dead C. elegans and calculated percent survival in both wild- type and daf-16 in both solutions. Our data indicate a significant effect of alcohol on survival, though the magnitude of the reduction in survival in response to ethanol is modest. Our data further indicate no significant effect of genotype on survival in response to ethanol exposure. From the collected data, we concluded that the daf-16 mutation has little to no effect on the alcohol-associated stress response of the C. elegans. Future work will be aimed at determining the role of daf-16 in organismal responses to other stressors.