Caenorhabditis elegans is a versatile model organism that has been applied to research involving obesity, aging, and neurodegenerative diseases. C. elegans has many advantages over traditional animal models, including ease of handling, a short lifespan, a fully sequenced genome, ease of genetic manipulation, and a high similarity to human disease-related genes. With established C. elegans models of human disease, C. elegans provides a great platform for studying disease pathologies, including endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress, which is characterized by the accumulation of unfolded and misfolded proteins involved in the pathologies of many diseases. ER stress can lead to activation of the unfolded and misfolded protein response, a mechanism that attenuates ER stress and recovers ER homeostasis. The current review gives an introduction to C. elegans and ER stress, along with the pathological role of ER stress in disease and the application of worm models in ER stress-related research.
Keywords: Caenorhabditis elegans; endoplasmic reticulum stress; unfolded protein response.