Transforming a fertilized egg into a fully functioning adult is a complex task. Cells need to separate, move, and mature at certain times. Developmental genes control that process, turning it on and off in a dance-shaped manner.
However, development is affected by the environment. A team of researchers led by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Associate Professor Christopher Hammell reported on 22 December 2020, in the journal Conventional biology how gene activity matches nutrient levels.
They found a major change improving the use of worms to stop growth when nutrients are scarce. As the environment improves, animals continue to improve. The inversion alters gene activity to match nutritional levels.
Caenorhabditis elegans a worm is round. In a laboratory, this worm develops from an embryo to a 959-cell adult in about three days. Hammell says:
This always happens in the same way. You will always get 959 cells, and the patterns of those regions that give you those cells will always be made in the same way between one animal and the next. “
Christopher Hammell, Associate Professor, Cold Ocean Laboratory
The genes that guide this flexible program turn on and off in predictable patterns such as embryo morphs through several larval stages to a fully formed worm.
In the countryside, worms cannot always rely on a comfortable temperature and abundant food. Sometimes, development has to stop until conditions improve. Hammell’s team discovered a protein called BLMP-1 that alters gene activity (transcription) to keep up with development.
When conditions are good, BLMP-1 levels increase and break down strands of DNA, so genes are more accessible. Entrepreneurs then turn the genes on at the right time.
“This is a way of expecting to say ‘everything is fine, make as strong a development as possible,'” Hammell explains. If conditions are not optimal, BLMP-1 levels decline, leaving genes tightly packed away, slowing or even stopping development.
Tests showed the BLMP-1 team as a key regulator of thousands of genes that cycle on and off during development. Hammell says that was a surprise since his team first began studying this process in just a handful of development genes. BLMP-1 is unique in that it coordinates a wide variety of processes.
Hammell is not the first researcher to draw attention to BLMP-1. A gene is known to be like a mutation in some human blood cancers, where it alters the activity of a large set of genes. Hammell is hopeful that BLMP-1 will be in place C. elegans it provides a model system for the study of human diseases.
Source:
Cold Ocean Laboratory
Magazine Reference:
Stec, N., et al. (2020) Nutrient-mediated epigenetic priming mechanism regulates transcription output during C. elegans development. Conventional biology. doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.11.060.