[
International Worm Meeting,
2021]
Competition for nutrients is a driving force in evolution. As such, organisms have evolved robust adaptive responses to withstand periods of starvation. In C. elegans, efforts have been made to map the acute starvation response at the transcriptome level using microarray and RNA-seq techniques. However, past studies used whole worms and thus represent an averaged response profile of all of the worms' tissues. Recently, Kaletsky and colleagues developed methods to isolate and study purified C. elegans cell populations from larvae, which allows studying tissue-specific transcriptomes. To gain a better understanding of the response to starvation and potentially reveal unique tissue-specific responses, we are adapting this technique to study how neurons, hypodermis, intestine, and body wall muscles respond to starvation. Specifically, we have used four strains that express GFP in each of these tissues of interest. We then dissociate worms into single cells and FACS-sort GFP-labeled tissues both fed and starved animals, followed by RNA isolation and RNA-sequencing. To date, we have sequenced mRNA from neuronal and body wall muscle tissues from fed animals and animals that were starved for six hours. Preliminary analysis indicates that starvation induces broader changes in neurons compared to body wall muscle. Interestingly, using a liberal significance threshold of P <.05 and FDR < 1, only 11% of genes are regulated by starvation in both tissues, suggesting that tissues respond in a highly specific manner to starvation. In neurons, we observed a positive enrichment for biological processes involved in guanylyl cyclase signaling and cell projection remodeling, whereas negatively enriched processes included protein translation and ribosome assembly. In muscles, we observed positive enrichment of the ER unfolded protein response and cuticle remodeling, and negative enrichment of protein synthesis. Our work demonstrates variation in responses to starvation between tissues. The methods described will allow us to assemble a profile for each tissue, which can be used to develop functional experiments to unravel the biology of the starvation response.