Probing lysosomal activity in vivo

Abstract

Lysosomes are membrane-bound organelles for biomolecule degradation and recycling. They also serve as a nutrient sensing and signaling center to maintain cell and tissue homeostasis. Lysosomal properties alter in response to developmental or environmental cues, but these changes are hard to track in vivo. Employing C. elegans as a model system, we have developed assays to examine and quantify lysosome properties in vivo, including lysosome maturation, acidification and cleavage activity. These assays can be used to reveal alterations of lysosomal activity during C. elegans development and in stress conditions.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Lysosomes / C. elegans / Maturation / Acidification / Cleavage activity

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Acknowledgements

Some strains were provided by the CGC, which is funded by NIH Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (P40OD010440). This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (3163001, 91754203), the Ministry of Science and Technology (2016YFA0500203), and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB19000000) to X. Wang. X. Li is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31671401).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Conflict of interest Xin Li, Yanan Sun and Xiaochen Wang declare that they have no conflict of interest. Human and animal rights and informed consent This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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2021 The Author(s) 2021. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)