Skip Navigation
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

Use this QR code to view the newest version of this document
Use this QR code to view the newest version of this document

Your Environment. Your Health.

Publication Detail

Title: Genetic and physiological activation of osmosensitive gene expression mimics transcriptional signatures of pathogen infection in C. elegans.

Authors: Rohlfing, Anne-Katrin; Miteva, Yana; Hannenhalli, Sridhar; Lamitina, Todd

Published In PLoS One, (2010 Feb 02)

Abstract: The soil-dwelling nematode C. elegans is a powerful system for comparative molecular analyses of environmental stress response mechanisms. Infection of worms with bacterial and fungal pathogens causes the activation of well-characterized innate immune transcriptional programs in pathogen-exposed hypodermal and intestinal tissues. However, the pathophysiological events that drive such transcriptional responses are not understood. Here, we show that infection-activated transcriptional responses are, in large part, recapitulated by either physiological or genetic activation of the osmotic stress response. Microarray profiling of wild type worms exposed to non-lethal hypertonicity identified a suite of genes that were also regulated by infection. Expression profiles of five different osmotic stress resistant (osr) mutants under isotonic conditions reiterated the wild type transcriptional response to osmotic stress and also showed substantial similarity to infection-induced gene expression under isotonic conditions. Computational, transgenic, and functional approaches revealed that two GATA transcription factors previously implicated in infection-induced transcriptional responses, elt-2 and elt-3, are also essential for coordinated tissue-specific activation of osmosensitive gene expression and promote survival under osmotically stressful conditions. Together, our data suggest infection and osmotic adaptation share previously unappreciated transcriptional similarities which might be controlled via regulation of tissue-specific GATA transcription factors.

PubMed ID: 20126308 Exiting the NIEHS site

MeSH Terms: Actinomycetales/physiology; Animals; Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins/genetics*; Caenorhabditis elegans/genetics*; Caenorhabditis elegans/microbiology; Caenorhabditis elegans/physiology; Cluster Analysis; GATA Transcription Factors/genetics; Gene Expression Profiling*; Gene Expression Regulation/drug effects; Gene Expression Regulation/genetics*; Host-Pathogen Interactions; Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; Osmosis; RNA Interference; Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction; Salt-Tolerance/genetics; Sodium Chloride/pharmacology

Back
to Top