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Date of Award
2025
Document Type
Campus Access Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Biological Sciences (MS)
Administrative Home Department
Department of Biological Sciences
Advisor 1
Paul D. Goetsch
Committee Member 1
Gordon Paterson
Committee Member 2
Guiliang Tang
Abstract
A soma-to-germline transformation, a phenomenon seen in multiple cancer types, is when somatic cells adopt properties exclusive to germ cells. The mechanism of the misexpression of germline genes is not fully understood. In the organism Caenorhabditis elegans, the soma-to-germline transformation occurs with a loss-of-function mutation in the transcription regulator complex known as DRM. We hypothesize that DRM indirectly represses germline gene transcription in somatic cells to prevent soma-to-germline transformation by directly repressing transcription of germline genes. We predict that when DRM function is lost in C. elegans, the transcription factor(s) will activate the targeted germline genes in somatic cells. To test this hypothesis, we performed an RNA interference (RNAi) screen to assess the suppression of ectopic expression of the GFP-tagged glh-1 gene in the lin-35(n745) DRM loss-of-function strain. We used mes-4 as our positive control due to its ability to suppress ectopic expression in DRM mutants. We discovered four genes of interest: oma-2, ceh-39, pqn-21, and sptf-3 as transcription factors that may activate ectopic expression of germline genes in somatic cells. These results help glean insight into how DRM protects somatic cells from the soma-to-germline transformation, which can be applied to an understanding of the phenomenon in cancer cells.
Recommended Citation
Parsons, Ryleigh A., "ASSESSING ACTIVATORS OF CAENORHABDITIS ELEGANS GERMLINE EXPRESSION USING AN RNA INTERFERENCE SCREEN", Campus Access Master's Thesis, Michigan Technological University, 2025.