Posted by The elevated occurrence of debilitating neurodegenerative disorders, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Huntington’s disease (HD), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Machado–Joseph disease (MJD), demands urgent disease-modifying therapeutics. Owing to the evolutionarily conserved molecular signalling pathways with mammalian species and facile genetic manipulation, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) emerges as a powerful and manipulative model system for mechanistic insights into neurodegenerative diseases. Herein, several representative C. elegans models are reviewed, which were established for five common neurodegenerative diseases, and which closely simulate disease phenotypes specifically in the gain-of-function aspect. Several applications of high-throughput genetic and drug screenings are shown to illustrate the potential of C. elegans to probe novel therapeutic targets. This review highlights the utility of C. elegans as a comprehensive and versatile platform for the dissection of neurodegenerative diseases at the molecular level.
Read more in the Review: Towards Understanding Neurodegenerative Diseases: Insights from Caenorhabditis elegans Yingjie Wu, Yining Chen, Xiaochun Yu, Minxing Zhang and Zhaoyu Li Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024, 25(1), 443; DOI: 10.3390/ijms25010443
There are a few examples in the CD-related literature on using CD itself [1] or a CD-formulated drug [25] studied in C. elegans.
[1] Szente et al. Aging 2021, 13, 1717-1725. https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202533
[2] Ginan-Ferré et al. Nutrients 2021, 13, 2411. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu13072411
[3] Matencio et al. Int. J. Pharm. 2020, 589, 119862. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpharm.2020.119862
[4] Lucio et al. Int. J. Pharm. 2018, 547, 97-105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpharm.2018.05.064
[5] Nakatani et al. Eur. J. Nutr. 2017, 57, 1137–1146. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00394-017-1396-0
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