Characterization of larval growth in C. elegans cuticle mutants

Abstract

In Caenorhabditis elegans, many genes involved in the formation of the cuticle are also known to influence body size and shape. We assessed post-embryonic growth of both long and short C. elegans body size mutants from the L1 to L4 stage. We found similar developmental trajectories of N2 and lon-3 animals. By contrast, we observed overall decreases in body length and increases in body width of tested dpy mutants compared to N2, consistent with the Dpy phenotype. We further show that the dynamics of animal shape in the mutant strains are consistent with a previously proposed "Stretcher" growth model.

Figure 1. Quantitative assessment of larval growth

(A) Representative images of strains used in this study taken at the L4 stage. (B) Tukey boxplots for median animal fluorescence normalized by area, (C) median animal length (µM), and (D) median animal width (µM). The horizontal line in the middle of the box is the median, and the box denotes the 25th to 75th quantiles of the data. The vertical line represents the 1.5 interquartile range. Each point corresponds to the median value of a population of animals in each well. (E) Median length (x-axis) plotted against median length (y-axis). (F) The ratio of the change in width to length over time, calculated from the local slope of the population data, is shown as a solid line. The standard deviation, represented as the shaded region, captures population variation.