Date of Submission

Spring 2021

Academic Program

Biology; Global Public Health

Project Advisor 1

Heather Bennett

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Inadequate delivery of oxygen to organisms is known as hypoxia. Extended periods of oxygen deprivation can lead to cellular death and lifelong disabilities. However, there are a few biochemical and molecular pathways that have been shown to provide protection against the devastating effect of oxygen deprivation. Currently, the cellular, genetic and molecular pathways that lead to adaptation and survival to low oxygen environments have not been fully described. To identify pathways and conditions that yield protection and confer a survival advantage to low oxygen environments, we undertook a meta-analysis of published literature for mammalian studies to identify genes and mRNA transcripts changes that confer resistance to oxygen deprivation through the model organism of Caenorhabditis elegans. With the data collected from the cross-species analysis, we aim to develop an extensive list of conserved genes that mediate survival to oxygen deprivation. We will undertake a bioinformatics approach to identify potential genetic and molecular pathways that regulate adaptation to oxygen deprivation that are conserved across species. This list will then be used to determine biologically relevant pathways of interest. For ensuing steps, we provide procedural steps to further characterize the impacts of these genes for conserved roles in regulating oxygen deprivation in C. elegans by testing loss and gain of function alleles in a hypoxia survival assay. To our knowledge, this level of cross-species analysis has not been done and will implicate conserved genetic and molecular pathways that regulate response and survival to oxygen deprivation.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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