Dear All
Although C. elegans is one of the favourite model organisms in the lab, in its real world, it needs to encounter various microbial threats in the soil. One of the threats is a bacterial toxin which some of the strains of this worm learnt to become resistant. Pl. see this commentary and an accompanying paper where Gupta and coworkers have nailed the reason for resistance to few amino acid deletions in a glutamate-gated ion channel. The crystal structure of this protein is also available, but alas we don't know it all - since the crucial deletion region is in the N-terminus and was not included in the crystallisation! But, one could speculate these residues might participate in the ligand-binding pocket.
Surviving in a Toxic World
Adrian J. Wolstenholme Natural variations in a single gene of wild C. elegans populations confer resistanceto the bacterial toxin avermectin. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/335/6068/545<http://app.aaas-science.org/e/er?s=1906&lid=11674&elq=696c02feff474b108d09a9df581f3761>
has News-and-Views of the same.
Sowdhamini
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