Grant: Fellowship: Canada Impact+ Research Training Awards - Postdoctoral

"As human actions drive climate and environment change, the ability of an organism to respond to external stresses is increasingly important. Gene regulation is at the heart of many of these responses. The C. elegans dauer is an outstanding model for studying such gene regulatory changes, as it is a developmental stage induced by poor conditions in early life, with unique transcriptomes during dauer entry, exit and during dauer itself. Little is known about how these stress-driven transcriptomic changes are controlled. Argonaute/small RNA (AGO/sRNA) mediated gene expression is a likely candidate, as some sRNAs and AGOs are differentially regulated during/after dauer, This project seeks to systematically assess roles for any of the 19 C. elegans AGOs in regulate gene expression before/during/after dauer. Using a toolkit of tagged AGOs and ago null mutants, I will screen for dauer-specific changes in AGO expression and dauer phenotypes. This screen will prioritize AGOs for immunoprecipitation/small RNA sequencing to computationally identify target mRNAs, and long-read mRNAseq in ago mutants to identify misregulated targets. Overall, this project will provide a comprehensive understanding of which AGOs mediate which gene expression changes in response to environmental stresses."