The Study Of Mir-260 And Mir-240 Regulate C.Elegans Lifespan

Aging is a biological process by which there is a gradual loss in the functioning of tissues and cells of an organism as time progresses, and the process begins from the organism’s post reproduction. As the organism is aging, some characteristic behavior will gradually occur like mortality increase, fertility decline, vulnerability increase and so on. Organism aging is one of the inevitable natural laws, but the perplexing questions of how and why aging occurs are still being deciphered despite decades of research and experimentation in order to find the answer to these questions and because of this complexity, scientists have began to use model organisms for aging research. Currently, the most commonly used model organisms are the C. elegans, drosophila melanogaster and the mice. The C. elegans have some advantages over the rest of the organisms like easy cultivation, short life span and the functions of all its genes are well known and for that is why the C.elegans is a better option organism model for aging research. Recent years’ researchers have reported that miRNAs play an important role in the aging process of the C. elegans, which has made it one of the most fascinating topics in the current aging biology.This paper will introduce several signaling pathways which are associated with aging, and then focusing on the miRNAs function in the C. elegans’development and regulation of their lifespan.In order to predict the signaling pathways in which miRNAs influence the aging process of the C. elegans,this research based on miRNAs mutants. The main work and achievements are as follows:Firstly, the aim of experiment was to determine and compare the lifespan of the different miRNA mutant species. Of the 12 species that were under test, the mir-240 and mir-260 were selected for investigation since they exhibited significant lifespan variation compare to the wild type N2 unlike the rest of the 10 species.Secondly, we investigated the age-related Physiological changes of mir-240 and mir-260, i.e the number of egg laid and pharyngeal pumping rate.Finally, using bioinformatics methods, we were able to theoretically predicted the target genes of mir-240 and mir-260 from microRNA, mirSOM websites, and then from the wormnet website, we were able to build the target gene network diagrams and from the wormbase website, analysis of the functions of the target genes was done. On analyzing the target genes, it was found that some genes have direct connections with the genes that have been earlier reported to playing key roles in commonly known signaling pathways, while the other genes have indirect connections. So it is through these key genes, that those other genes can enter the signaling pathway to regulate lifespan in the C.elegans. Our experiment results shows miRNAs can influence organisms aging, and combine this to target genes prediction we can predict the miRNAs possible signaling pathway, but this result remains to be further experiment.