Angeles-Albores David, Leighton Daniel H W, Tsou Tiffany, Khaw Tiffany H, Antoshechkin Igor, Sternberg Paul W
Department of Biology and Biological Engineering, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Caltech, Pasadena, California 91125.
Department of Human Genetics, Department of Biological Chemistry, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095.
G3 (Bethesda). 2017 Sep 7;7(9):2969-2977. doi: 10.1534/g3.117.300080.
Understanding genome and gene function in a whole organism requires us to fully comprehend the life cycle and the physiology of the organism in question. XX animals are hermaphrodites that exhaust their sperm after 3 d of egg-laying. Even though can live for many days after cessation of egg-laying, the molecular physiology of this state has not been as intensely studied as other parts of the life cycle, despite documented changes in behavior and metabolism. To study the effects of sperm depletion and aging of during the first 6 d of adulthood, we measured the transcriptomes of first-day adult hermaphrodites and sixth-day sperm-depleted adults, and, at the same time points, mutant worms that have a feminized germline phenotype. We found that we could separate the effects of biological aging from sperm depletion. For a large subset of genes, young adult animals had the same gene expression changes as sperm-depleted sixth-day wild-type hermaphrodites, and these genes did not change expression when females reached the sixth day of adulthood. Taken together, this indicates that changing sperm status causes a change in the internal state of the worm, which we call the female-like state. Our data provide a high-quality picture of the changes that happen in global gene expression throughout the period of early aging in the worm.
要在完整生物体中理解基因组和基因功能，就需要我们充分了解所研究生物体的生命周期和生理学。XX动物是雌雄同体，在产卵3天后精子耗尽。尽管在停止产卵后还能存活许多天，但这种状态下的分子生理学尚未像生命周期的其他阶段那样得到深入研究，尽管已有行为和新陈代谢变化的记录。为了研究成年后前6天精子耗尽和衰老对XX动物的影响，我们测量了第一天成年雌雄同体和第六天精子耗尽的成年动物的转录组，并且在相同时间点测量了具有雌性化生殖系表型的突变XX蠕虫的转录组。我们发现我们可以将生物衰老的影响与精子耗尽的影响区分开来。对于很大一部分基因，年轻成年XX动物与精子耗尽的第六天野生型雌雄同体具有相同的基因表达变化，并且当XX雌性动物达到成年第六天时这些基因的表达没有变化。综上所述，表示精子状态的改变会导致蠕虫内部状态的变化，我们将其称为类雌性状态。我们的数据提供了一幅高质量的画面，展示了蠕虫在早期衰老期间全局基因表达所发生的变化。
