C. elegans : an invaluable model organism for the proteomics studies of the cholesterol-mediated signaling pathway

Abstract

With the availability of its complete genome sequence and unique biological features relevant to human disease, Caenorhabditis elegans has become an invaluable model organism for the studies of proteomics, leading to the elucidation of nematode gene function. A journey from the genome to proteome of C. elegans may begin with preparation of expressed proteins, which enables a large-scale analysis of all possible proteins expressed under specific physiological conditions. Although various techniques have been used for proteomic analysis of C. elegans, systematic high-throughput analysis is still to come in order to accommodate studies of post-translational modification and quantitative analysis. Given that no integrated C. elegans protein expression database is available, it is about time that a global C. elegans proteome project is launched through which datasets of transcriptomes, protein–protein interaction and functional annotation can be integrated. As an initial target of a pilot project of the C. elegans proteome project, the cholesterol-mediated signaling pathway will be an excellent example since, like in other organisms, it is one of the key controlling pathways in cell growth and development in C. elegans. As this field tends to broaden to functional proteomics, there is a high demand to develop the versatile proteome informatics tools that can mange many different data in an integrative manner.

Keywords:

• Caenorhabditis elegans
• C. elegans proteome project
• cholesterol-mediated signaling pathway
• post-translational modification
• protein–protein interaction

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by a grant from the Korea Health 21 R&D Project, Ministry of Health & Welfare, Republic of Korea (A030003 to YKP), BioGreen 21 Project (YKP), the Technology Development Program of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Republic of Korea (606001-53-1-SB010 to YKP), and a grant from the Basic Research Program that is supported by KOSEF (RO1-2005-000-11021-0 to YHS) and partially supported by KRF 2004-F00019 to YHS.