Chemosensation in C. elegans.

By Cori Bargmann. WormBook, 2006

723 citations recorded by the source corpus.

C. elegans has a highly developed chemosensory system that enables it to detect a wide variety of volatile (olfactory) and water-soluble (gustatory) cues associated with food, danger, or other animals. Much of its nervous system and more than 5% of its genes are devoted to the recognition of environmental chemicals. Chemosensory cues can elicit chemotaxis, rapid avoidance, changes in overall motility, and entry into and exit from the alternative dauer developmental stage. These behaviors are regulated primarily by the amphid chemosensory organs, which contain eleven pairs of chemosensory neurons. Each amphid sensory neuron expresses a specific set of candidate receptor genes and detects a characteristic set of attractants, repellents, or pheromones. About 500-1000 different G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are expressed in chemosensory neurons, and these may be supplemented by alternative sensory pathways as well. Downstream of the GPCRs, two signal transduction systems are prominent in chemosensation, one that uses cGMP as a second messenger to open cGMP-gated channels, and one that relies upon TRPV channels. These sensory pathways are modulated and fine-tuned by kinases and phosphatases. Chemosensory preferences can be modified by sensory adaptation, developmental history, and associative learning, allowing C. elegans to integrate context and experience into its behavior.

Subfields: Aging, Endocrine and Autonomic Systems, Sensory Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6139a5d76314e63b34edefec1fb0b41984995de

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Citations in the corpus

A Transparent Window into Biology: A Primer on Caenorhabditis elegans (2015, background): “…a variety of behaviors, both simple and complex, including chemotaxis, thermotaxis, several responses to touch, male-specific mating rituals, social feeding, and both associative and nonassociative learning (Bargmann 2006; Hart 2006; Barr and Garcia 2006; Ardiel and Rankin 2010; Figure 4E).”
Differential chromatin marking of introns and expressed exons by H3K36me3 (2009, methodology): “To investigate relationships between transcription and different histone modifications, we generated four sets of genes: (i) 'top10', those in the top 10% of expression level in our samples, determined by gene expression profiling; (ii) 'bottom10', those in the bottom 10% of expression level; (iii) ”
Caenorhabditis elegans: An Emerging Model in Biomedical and Environmental Toxicology (2008, background): “…other external stimuli have facilitated the design of robust behavioral tests to assess the function of defined neuronal populations (Avery and Horvitz, 1990; Bargmann, 2006; Barr and Garcia, 2006; Brockie and Maricq, 2006; Chase and Koelle, 2007; Goodman, 2006; Morgan et al., 2007; Rand, 2007).”