Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience Commons^™

Novel Characterization Of The Role Of Orthologous Xap5 In Caenorhabditis Elegans, Nabor Vazquez

Lawrence University Honors Projects

Cilia are one of the oldest and most well conserved cellular organelles. Cilia provide an essential role in cellular locomotion, fluid regulation, and are a site for signal transduction pathways involved in sensation. A new study suggests that XAP5 is a transcription factor in a unicellular organism, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, which regulates gene expression needed for proper cilium assembly. Our study investigates the conservation of the role of XAP5 in a multicellular system, Caenorhabditis elegans. Alignments between protein, coding region, and promoter sequences for XAP5 orthologs from related species show a good conservation in DNA and protein sequences. As part of …