Presenter(s): Lucy Kelly − Geography
Faculty Mentor(s): Alex De Verteuil, Patrick Phillips
Poster 55
Research Area: Biological Science
Funding: Knight Campus Funding
SCORE (Students of Color Opportunities in Research Enrichment) is a mentorship program aimed at engaging underrepresented groups with original scientific research. To this end, we utilized an established biological model system to investigate an unexplored question. The nematode C. elegans is a classic genetic system, and its well-defined stress response network makes it ideal for evaluating the effects of ethanol on stress responses. In C. elegans, daf-16 is a transcription factor critical for regulating stress-response genes. In addition, at high concentrations, ethanol absorption leads to high rates of lethality in nematodes. It is then possible that daf-16 is critical for surviving this stress. To investigate this, we exposed both wild-type and daf-16 mutant animals to an acute ethanol stress following pre-exposure to a low concentration ethanol solution and measured survivorship. Additionally, we measured survivorship in both genotypes across multiple ethanol concentrations. In our conditions, high concentration ethanol exposure promotes widespread mortality in both daf-16 and wild-type animals. Furthermore, we found no significant difference in ethanol-induced mortality between genotypes at any ethanol concentration. These results suggest that daf-16 may not be implicated in ethanol-induced stress-responses. Here, programs like SCORE can achieve their educational missions while concurrently making advances in original research.