Description
Caenorhabditis elegans has become one of the premiere model systems for aging research due to their accessible genome and their ease of cultivation. Their genome is small compared to humans yet it encodes over 22,000 proteins; about 35% of C. elegans genes are closely related to human genes. The age-1 gene codes for phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase, which is part of a pathway that regulates longevity. An RNAi feeding vector was created to silence the age-1 gene. My hypothesis is that the lifespan of the treated nematodes will decrease relative to the control. The effectiveness of my constructed RNAi feeding strain will be studied by performing lifespan assays.
