Chronobiology
Author: Osvaldo Franciso Silva | email: Fransilvaj@gmail.com
Francisco Silva 1°, Rosana Rota 1°, Diego Golombek 1°, Maria Laura Migliori 1°
1° Laboratorio de Cronobiología, Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes
Circadian rhythms represent an adaptive feature, ubiquitously found in nature, which grants living beings the ability to anticipate daily variations in their environment. The nematode C. elegans provides an excellent model for genetics and neuro-behavioral studies and is currently used as a novel model for circadian research. The strain of C. elegans currently used in laboratories is the N2, and is considered a domesticated or laboratory strain. Various studies show that recent isolates of C. elegans are highly divergent at the genomic level with respect to the N2 strain due to the accumulation of numerous mutations. In this work, using a locomotor activity recording system we present a circadian screening of wild C. elegans isolates. Our results show that both the N2 and the wild MY23 strain populations were synchronized to a cold-warm (CW) cycle. N2 populations exhibited significant masking, while MY23 tended to be truly synchronized to the zeitgeber. Indeed, ~66% of the N2 strain populations were synchronized to a cold-warm cycle, increasing to 73% and 82% in the wild MY23 and DL238 strain populations, respectively. All strains retained circadian rhythms of ~24 h under constant conditions. Circadian characterization of wild C. elegans isolates, together with genomic data, would make it possible to identify genomic regions (or even genes) involved in synchronization.