The objective of this experiment was to determine changes in gene expression upon loss of
alfa-1 in C.elegans under well-fed and starvation conditions. The human C9orf72 has an orthologue in C. elegans based on sequence homology, which is the F18A1.6 gene and also recently named as
alfa-1 (ALS/FTD-associated gene homolog 1). We analyzed the domain structure of ALFA-1 and found that it shares the same DENN domains as human C9orf72, including the uDENN, cDENN, and dDENN domains. We obtained a mutant strain of the
alfa-1 gene, which has a mutant allele (
ok3062) of 486 bp deletion and 24 bp insertion in the region of exon 3 and exon 4. To understand the changes in gene expression in the
alfa-1 mutant C. elegans, we performed the microarray gene expression profiling experiments under the defined conditions.