Department of Basic Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Crete, Crete, Greece.
Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas , Crete, Greece.
Methods Mol Biol. 2022;2515:309-317. doi: 10.1007/978-1-0716-2409-8_19.
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a powerful experimental platform for cell biology studies. The molecular mechanisms that mediate cell death and neurodegeneration have been characterized extensively in the nematode. In addition, the availability of a wide arsenal of genetic and molecular tools and methodologies renders C. elegans an organism of choice for modeling human neurodegenerative diseases. Indeed, neuronal necrosis can readily be observed and examined in vivo, in the worm. In this chapter, we describe the two main approaches that are routinely used for monitoring and quantifying neuronal cell death in C. elegans. The first is based on direct visualization of dying cells via Nomarski differential interference contrast (DiC) microscopy, and the second on the assessment of neuronal survival by fluorescence microscopy.
秀丽隐杆线虫是细胞生物学研究的强大实验平台。在秀丽隐杆线虫中，介导细胞死亡和神经退行性变的分子机制已经得到了广泛的研究。此外，由于广泛的遗传和分子工具和方法学的可用性，秀丽隐杆线虫成为模拟人类神经退行性疾病的首选生物体。事实上，在蠕虫体内，可以很容易地观察和检查神经元坏死。在本章中，我们描述了两种常规用于监测和量化秀丽隐杆线虫中神经元细胞死亡的主要方法。第一种方法是通过诺玛斯基微分干涉对比（DiC）显微镜直接观察死亡细胞，第二种方法是通过荧光显微镜评估神经元的存活。
