TY  - GEN
T1  - Auxin does not affect a suite of morphological or behavioral phenotypes in two wild-type C. elegans strains
AU  - McDiarmid, Troy A
AU  - Kepler, Lexis D
AU  - Rankin, Catharine H
DO  - 10.17912/micropub.biology.000307
UR  - http://beta.micropublication.org/journals/biology/micropub-biology-000307/
AB  - The Auxin-Inducible Degradation (AID) system is a powerful technique in the C. elegans toolkit that enables conditional and reversible protein depletion with high temporal and spatial specificity (Zhang et al. 2015; Martinez et al. 2020; Ashley et al. 2020; Martinez and Matus 2020). This system relies on tagging a gene of interest with a short AID degron sequence and transgenic expression of TIR1, an inducible E3 ubiquitin ligase normally found only in plants (Nishimura et al. 2009; Zhang et al. 2015). Upon exposure to the plant-derived hormone Auxin, TIR1 is activated and targets AID-tagged proteins for proteasomal degradation (Nishimura et al. 2009; Zhang et al. 2015) (Figure 1A). While there are qualitative reports that Auxin does not overtly affect the morphology or behavior of wild-type C. elegans (Zhang et al. 2015), this has not been quantitatively assessed. Determining whether Auxin significantly affects C. elegans morphology and behavior, even in subtle ways, is important given the C. elegans community’s rapid uptake of the AID system (Kasimatis et al. 2018; Nance and Frøkjær-Jensen 2019; Ashley et al. 2020; McDiarmid et al. 2020). Here, we use our high-throughput machine vision tracking system, the Multi-Worm Tracker (MWT) (Swierczek et al. 2011), to investigate whether exposure to Auxin affects a suite of morphological, locomotor, mechanosensory, and short-term habituation learning phenotypes in our lab’s derivative of Bristol N2 wild-type worms and the CGC wild-type reference strain, PD1074 (Yoshimura et al. 2019) (Figure 1B).
PY  - 2020
JO  - microPublication Biology
ER  -