Team:Queens Canada/Project/Methods

As C. elegans is a multi-celleular organism, developing a concrete approach to our project required extensive research and planning. This section outlines our general methodology to tackling the bioremediation concept.

Since C. elegans is a multicellular organism, we needed to make sure our non-native GPCR was expressed in the neurons that would stimulate our worm to move towards the ligand. To accomplish this, we researched GPCRs that would normally be expressed in the olfactory (“smelling”) neurons of the worm. Then, we kept the promoter of the native GPCR and substituted the rest of the protein with our foreign GPCR. Hence, our constructs consist of a C. elegans promoter, followed by a non-native GPCR and terminated by the C. elegans UNC-54 terminator that our team researched last year.

After narrowing down our project idea, the first step we took was to research compounds and G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) our worm could use to detect pollutants.

1. PharmacoInformatics Laboratory, GLIDA: GPCR Ligand Database (ver. 2.04, 2010), Kyoto University
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