Abstract
C. elegans has several advantages as an experimental host for the study of infectious diseases. Worms are easily maintained and propagated on bacterial lawns. The worms can be frozen for long term storage and still maintain viability years later. Their short generation time and large brood size of thousands of worms grown on a single petri dish, makes it relatively easy to maintain at a low cost. The typical wild type adult worm grows to approximately 1.5 mm in length and are transparent, allowing for the identification of several internal organs using an affordable dissecting microscope. A large collection of loss of function mutant strains are readily available from the C. elegans genetic stock center, making targeted genetic studies in the nematode possible. Here we describe ways in which this facile model host has been used to study Candida albicans, an opportunistic fungal pathogen that poses a serious public health threat.
Highlights
Caenorhabditis elegans is a nematode that is naturally found in soil and compost [1] and has been used as a powerful model organism for more than 50 years
Traditionally used to study molecular and developmental biology, researchers in the past 20 years have begun to use C. elegans to investigate the biology of various human bacterial pathogens including Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella enterica, and Serratia marcescens [13,14,15,16,17,18,19], as well as fungal pathogens such as Cryptococcus neoformans and Candida albicans [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28]
The food can be a mixture of E. coli and C. albicans or they can be seeded independently, where the bacteria is used as control and the C. albicans as the variable tested
Summary
Caenorhabditis elegans is a nematode that is naturally found in soil and compost [1] and has been used as a powerful model organism for more than 50 years. For example RIM101, a C. albicans transcription factor required for alkaline-induced hyphal growth is required for both virulence in murine oropharyngeal candidiasis [41] and virulence in C. elegans [23] Other genes such as NRG1, CAS5, ADA2, CPH1 and EFG1 have shown to be required for virulence in both mice and nematodes [23,28,42] (Figure 1C). Seven of the 19 compounds capable of extending nematodes survival were known to have antimycotic activity, validating the approach Taken together these studies show that C. elegans can be used as a powerful tool to study, the complex host-pathogen dynamics, and for initial large-scale drug screening [44,45,46,47]. C. elegans can be leveraged as the perfect go-between model host between in vitro studies and mammalian models
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