Caenorhabditis elegans: An Emerging Model in Biomedical and Environmental Toxicology

Abstract

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has emerged as an important animal model in various fields including neurobiology, developmental biology, and genetics. Characteristics of this animal model that have contributed to its success include its genetic manipulability, invariant and fully described developmental program, well-characterized genome, ease of maintenance, short and prolific life cycle, and small body size. These same features have led to an increasing use of C. elegans in toxicology, both for mechanistic studies and high-throughput screening approaches. We describe some of the research that has been carried out in the areas of neurotoxicology, genetic toxicology, and environmental toxicology, as well as high-throughput experiments with C. elegans including genome-wide screening for molecular targets of toxicity and rapid toxicity assessment for new chemicals. We argue for an increased role for C. elegans in complementing other model systems in toxicological research.

Chemical Signals of Vector Beetle Facilitate the Prevalence of a Native Fungus and the Invasive Pinewood Nematode

“…'' by their ability to bind to denatured proteins arising from such stress, and prevent their irreversible aggregation. As C. elegans is considered an excellent animal model for biomedical and environmental toxicology (Leung et al, 2008), one of the objectives of this study was to evaluate the early response of the CeHSP17 protein under different environmental stressors, including temperature and heavy metals. In the present work, we characterized the biological function of CeHSP17 protein from C. elegans under a variety of experimental conditions and showed for the first time that this protein is highly inducible by temperature shifts and heavy metal ions.…”

Protective efficacy of selenite against lead-induced neurotoxicity in Caenorhabditis elegans

“…Moreover, C. elegans was established as a model for studying neurotoxicity because it contains 302 neurons; its neuronal lineage is fully described [17,18]. In addition, neurotransmitter systems, including serotonergic, cholinergic, glutamatergic, and c-aminobutyric acid (GABA)-ergic synapses and their genetic networks are phylogenetically conserved from nematodes to vertebrates, which allows findings from C. elegans to be extrapolated and further confirmed in vertebrate systems [18].…”

A microfluidic device for automated, high-speed microinjection of Caenorhabditis elegans

“…The success rate could be further enhanced through (i) addressing the issues of micropipette clogging and pipette-worm body misalignment and (ii) more accurate on-chip size synchronization method of the loaded worms using a microfluidic device integrated with computer vision algorithms for automatic worm sizing. 33,38,56 The current worm injection system is more suitable for drug testing/screening applications (in which drug/chemical solutions need to be injected into the worm body); 20,25 however, it is still challenging for the system to perform microinjection of the worm gonad for creating transgenic C. elegans due to the following reasons. The microfluidic device uses a narrow channel to immobilize a C. elegans worm, and the compressed worm body makes the visual identification of the gonad difficult.…”

“…[20][21][22][23][24][25][26] Besides drug testing/screening applications, microinjection has also been widely used to deliver generic materials (e.g., DNA, morpholino, and RNAi) into the gonad of C. elegans to create transgenetic animals. 27 The state-of-the-art manual injection of C. elegans is labor-intensive and inconsistent, leading to low-throughput and uncertainties in results.…”