Publication Date:
2009-04-18
Description:
Oxygen deprivation is rapidly deleterious for most organisms. However, Caenorhabditis elegans has developed the ability to survive anoxia for at least 48 hours. Mutations in the DAF-2/DAF-16 insulin-like signaling pathway promote such survival. We describe a pathway involving the HYL-2 ceramide synthase that acts independently of DAF-2. Loss of the ceramide synthase gene hyl-2 results in increased sensitivity of C. elegans to anoxia. C. elegans has two ceramide synthases, hyl-1 and hyl-2, that participate in ceramide biogenesis and affect its ability to survive anoxic conditions. In contrast to hyl-2(lf) mutants, hyl-1(lf) mutants are more resistant to anoxia than normal animals. HYL-1 and HYL-2 have complementary specificities for fatty acyl chains. These data indicate that specific ceramides produced by HYL-2 confer resistance to anoxia.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Menuz, Vincent -- Howell, Kate S -- Gentina, Sebastien -- Epstein, Sharon -- Riezman, Isabelle -- Fornallaz-Mulhauser, Monique -- Hengartner, Michael O -- Gomez, Marie -- Riezman, Howard -- Martinou, Jean-Claude -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2009 Apr 17;324(5925):381-4. doi: 10.1126/science.1168532.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Cell Biology, University of Geneva, CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19372430" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Apoptosis
;
Caenorhabditis elegans/cytology/genetics/*physiology
;
Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins/*genetics/*metabolism
;
*Cell Hypoxia
;
Ceramides/biosynthesis/*physiology
;
Gene Deletion
;
Genes, Helminth
;
Mutation
;
Oxidoreductases/*genetics/*metabolism
;
Oxygen/*physiology
;
Receptor, Insulin/genetics/metabolism
;
Saccharomyces cerevisiae/genetics/growth & development/physiology
;
Sphingomyelins/biosynthesis/physiology
;
Substrate Specificity
;
Transformation, Genetic
;
Transgenes
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
