Sarah Nolan
IUUR STEM Summer Research Program
Major: Neuroscience
Mentors: Heather Hundley, Priyanka Mukherjee, and Ananya Mahapatra
Adenosine deaminases acting on RNA (ADARs) are proteins that function to both bind to double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) and edit dsRNA by catalyzing the deamination of adenosine to inosine. Inosine exhibits properties similar to guanosine causing it to be recognized as guanosine in the ribonucleic sequence. This editing function therefore helps regulate gene expression by changing the recoded RNA sequence which results in alterations in the proteins that are translated.
In whole C. elegans and neural cells, in the absence of ADR-2, we observed a significant downregulation of immune system genes, one of them being dod-19. In order to determine if ADR-2 editing is a significant factor in the regulation of dod-19 expression, we compared the expression of dod-19 in mutant strains that lack only the editing function of ADR-2 (G184R mutant) with both the wildtype strains and the strains that completely lack ADR-2. The C. elegans used in the preliminary experiments were also starved, and we want to examine if starvation could also have a role in the downregulation dod-19.
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