Title: Analysis of cyanide toxicity in C. elegans
Speaker: Archana Parashar, ECpE Graduate Student
Abstract: Exposure to environmental toxicants poses a risk to individual’s development, health, behavior, and ultimately survival. Caenorhabditis elegans has emerged as a useful model for genetic and developmental biological research. Practical advantages, along with well-characterized genome, ease of maintenance, short life cycle, microscopic body size, availability of mutant, and plethora of biological information including stress-response pathways, have successfully steered to the increased use of C. elegans in toxicological studies. In this talk, we present a novel microfluidic/imaging platform to describe the effects of cyanide toxicity in C. elegans with high spatio-temporal resolution. Our platform allowed us to examine the genetic ground of cyanide resistance. We addressed a series of challenges presented by mutant phenotypes and by the chemical nature of the toxin through designing microfluidic devices, in combination with real-time worm tracking. The assay produced a set of behavioural parameters that described the cyanide resistance in C. elegans, which was particularly useful in analysing subtle phenotypes.