Rescuing the Fertility of adsl-1 Mutant C. elegans

Abstract

Inborn errors of purine metabolism are a group of rare disorders that effect the way the body is able to synthesize purines and break them down into uric acid, one such disorder is adenylosuccinate lyase deficiency (ASLD), a metabolic disorder affecting humans. We use C. elegans as a model to study the mechanisms of the infertility seen in ADSL mutants. In this study I aim to investigate the reason for defects in fertility. We are going to do this by constructing a plasmid aimed at restoring adsl-1 expression to its native location by using the lin61/adsl-1 promoter in order to create transgenic animals whose progeny display the desired extrachromosomal array. The results show that the lin-61/adsl-1 promoter was able to rescue fertility 17.3% indicating that the low efficacy could be due to incomplete rescue. This means that further action can be taken to determine if the incomplete rescue is due to the animal not having a gonad or not having viable ovum. This experiment lays down the groundwork for future experiments like this using different promoters.

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Abuzaid, H.