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Metallomics,
2017]
Systemic trafficking and storage of essential metal ions play fundamental roles in living organisms by serving as essential cofactors in various cellular processes. Thereby metal quantification and localization are critical steps in understanding metal homeostasis, and how their dyshomeostasis might contribute to disease etiology and the ensuing pathologies. Furthermore, the amount and distribution of metals in organisms can provide insight into their underlying mechanisms of toxicity and toxicokinetics. While in vivo studies on metal imaging in mammalian experimental animals are complex, time- and resource-consuming, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) provides a suitable comparative and complementary model system. Expressing homologous genes to those inherent to mammals, including those that regulate metal homeostasis and transport, C. elegans has become a powerful tool to study metal homeostasis and toxicity. A number of recent technical advances have been made in the development and application of analytical methods to visualize metal ions in C. elegans. Here, we briefly summarize key findings and challenges of the three main techniques and their application to the nematode, namely sensing fluorophores, microbeam synchrotron radiation X-ray fluorescence as well as laser ablation (LA) coupled to inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS).
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Cell Physiol Biochem,
2013]
One of the most pressing challenges in the post genomic era is the identification and characterization of protein-protein interactions (PPIs), as these are essential in understanding the cellular physiology of health and disease. Experimental techniques suitable for characterizing PPIs (X-ray crystallography or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, among others) are usually laborious, time-consuming and often difficult to apply to membrane proteins, and therefore require accurate prediction of the candidate interacting partners. High-throughput experimental methods (yeast two-hybrid and affinity purification) succumb to the same shortcomings, and can also lead to high rates of false positive and negative results. Therefore, reliable tools for predicting PPIs are needed. The use of the operon structure in the eukaryote Caenorhabditis elegans genome is a valuable, though underserved, tool for identifying physically or functionally interacting proteins. Based on the concept that genes organized in the same operon may encode physically or functionally related proteins, this algorithm is easy to be applied and, importantly, gives a limited number of candidate partners of a given protein, allowing for focused experimental verification. Moreover, this approach can be successfully used to predict PPIs in the human system, including those of membrane proteins.