A cGAL-UAS bipartite expression toolkit for Caenorhabditis elegans sensory neurons
-
1.
California Institute of Technology
Abstract
Animals integrate sensory information from the environment and display various behaviors in response to external stimuli. In Caenorhabditis elegans hermaphrodites, 33 types of sensory neurons are responsible for chemosensation, olfaction, and mechanosensation. However, the functional roles of all sensory neurons have not been systematically studied due to the lack of facile genetic accessibility. A bipartite cGAL-UAS system has been previously developed to study tissue- or cell-specific functions in C. elegans. Here, we report a toolkit of new cGAL drivers that can facilitate the analysis of a vast majority of the 60 sensory neurons in C. elegans hermaphrodites. We generated 37 sensory neuronal cGAL drivers that drive cGAL expression by cell-specific regulatory sequences or intersection of two distinct regulatory regions with overlapping expression (split cGAL). Most cGAL-drivers exhibit expression in single types of cells. We also constructed 28 UAS effectors that allow expression of proteins to perturb or interrogate sensory neurons of choice. This cGAL-UAS sensory neuron toolkit provides a genetic platform to systematically study the functions of C. elegans sensory neurons.
Copyright and License
© 2023 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. This article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
Acknowledgement
We thank members of our laboratory for insightful discussions through the course of this work and Cynthia Chai for constructs. We thank Sharan Prakash and other members of the Sternberg Lab for their comments on the manuscript. We thank our colleagues who contributed effector genes fragments: Bill Schafer (MRC); Cori Bargmann (Rockefeller); Dengke Ma (UCSF); Douglas Portman (Rochester); Kevin Collins (University of Miami); Steve Flavell (MIT); and Yishi Jin (USCD). Promoter details for sra-6 and gpa-13 were kindly provided by Bill Schafer. Some strains were provided by the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center, which is funded by NIH Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (P40 OD010440). WormBase provided information about genome sequence and annotations. This study was supported by R21MH115454, UF1NS111697, and R01NS113119 (P.W.S.). M.Z. was supported by F31 NS120501. H.W. was supported by K99GM126137.
Contributions
X.W., H.W., J.L., and P.W.S. designed research; S.N., W.P., X.W., J.Y.O., S.G., J.S.R., M.T., M.Z., C.-H.C., J.S.L., and B.P. performed research; and S.N., W.P., X.W., C.-H.C., and P.W.S. wrote the paper.
Data Availability
All study data are included in the article and/or supporting information.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no competing interest.
Files
Additional details
- ISSN
- 1091-6490
- PMCID
- PMC10743456
- National Institutes of Health
- P40 OD010440
- National Institutes of Health
- R21 MH115454
- National Institutes of Health
- UF1NS111697
- National Institutes of Health
- R01NS113119
- National Institutes of Health
- NIH Postdoctoral Fwllowship F31 NS120501
- National Institutes of Health
- K99GM126137
- Caltech groups
- Division of Biology and Biological Engineering