Neurobiology of the Caenorhabditis elegans Genome

Author:

Bargmann Cornelia I.1

Affiliation:

1. The author is at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Programs in Developmental Biology, Neuroscience, and Genetics, Departments of Anatomy and Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143–0452, USA.

Abstract

Neurotransmitter receptors, neurotransmitter synthesis and release pathways, and heterotrimeric GTP–binding protein (G protein)–coupled second messenger pathways are highly conserved between Caenorhabditis elegans and mammals, but gap junctions and chemosensory receptors have independent origins in vertebrates and nematodes. Most ion channels are similar to vertebrate channels but there are no predicted voltage-activated sodium channels. The C. elegans genome encodes at least 80 potassium channels, 90 neurotransmitter-gated ion channels, 50 peptide receptors, and up to 1000 orphan receptors that may be chemoreceptors. For many gene families, C. elegans has both conventional members and divergent outliers with weak homology to known genes; these outliers may provide insights into previously unknown functions of conserved protein families.

Publisher

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Subject

Multidisciplinary

Reference92 articles.

1. The embryonic cell lineage of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans

2. The structure of the nervous system of the nematodeCaenorhabditis elegans

3. Caenorhabditis elegans genes with relevance to the nervous system were sought by WU-BLAST 2.0a13 searches with channels receptors and signaling proteins to the C. elegans BLAST server (wormpep option) containing 18 452 predicted proteins about 90% of the genome. Protein matches with a probability of <10 −4 were examined further often by identifying the closest nonworm match to the C. elegans gene in a BLAST search to the NCBI nonredundant databases. For multigene families multiple alignments of the conserved domains used in Pfam were generated (often essentially the whole protein) aligning all the worm proteins found to nonworm proteins in the family from Swiss-Prot/swtrembl. This analysis will miss some real similarities and falsely include some similarities based on a single shared protein domain so it should be considered a first-pass approach rather than a complete description. A general overview and a list of the BLAST hits discussed here can be found at www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/c-elegans.shl and www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/986006.shl.

4. Although the true tetrodotoxin-sensitive sodium channel is absent from the genome it is possible that one of the divergent calcium or potassium channel sequences actually encodes a voltage-activated sodium channel. However this would represent an independent evolution of the channel rather than a true ortholog.

5. Gen(om)e duplications in the evolution of early vertebrates

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