Cholesterol-producing transgenic Caenorhabditis elegans lives longer due to newly acquired enhanced stress resistance.

Because Caenorhabditis elegans lacks several components of the de novo sterol biosynthetic pathway, it requires sterol as an essential nutrient. Supplemented cholesterol undergoes extensive enzymatic modification in C. elegans to form other sterols of unknown function.

Requirement of tyrosylprotein sulfotransferase-A for proper cuticle formation in the nematode C. elegans.

Tyrosine O-sulfation is one of the post-translational modification processes that occur to membrane proteins and secreted proteins in eukaryotes. Tyrosylprotein sulfotransferase (TPST) is responsible for this modification, and in this report, we describe the expression pattern and the biological role of TPST-A in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. We found that TPST-A was mainly expressed in the hypodermis, especially in the seam cells.

Functional genomic approaches using the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a model system.

Since the completion of the genome project of the nematode C. elegans in 1998, functional genomic approaches have been applied to elucidate the gene and protein networks in this model organism. The recent completion of the whole genome of C.

Neuron cell type-specific SNAP-25 expression driven by multiple regulatory elements in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.

In order to characterize the mechanisms regulating neuronal expression of the nematode SNAP-25 gene, we identified the SNAP-25 genes of Caenorhabditis elegans and Caenorhabditis briggsae. Comparative sequence analysis and reporter assays revealed two putative 5' regulatory elements, P1 and P2, and four elements, I1h, I1m, I2h, and I2m, in the first intron. Nuclear extracts contained activities that bound the P2 and I1h elements.

Sequence-specific binding to telomeric DNA by CEH-37, a homeodomain protein in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.

Caenorhabditis elegans can serve as a model system to study telomere functions due to its similarity to higher organisms in telomere structures. We report here the identification of the nematode homeodomain protein CEH-37 as a telomere-binding protein using a yeast one-hybrid screen. The predicted three-dimensional model of the homeodomain of CEH-37, which has a typical helix-loop-helix structure, was similar to that of the Myb domain of known telomere-binding proteins, which is also a helix-loop-helix protein, despite little amino acid sequence similarity.