Cuticular collagens mediate cross-kingdom predator–prey interactions between trapping fungi and nematodes
Fig 3
NHR-66 regulates the expression of the collagen gene family in Caenorhabditis elegans.
(A) Principal component analysis of transcript expression from wildtype (N2) and nhr-66(yph413) mutants across three biological replicates. (B) Heatmap comparison of differentially expressed genes (≥ 4-fold change) between N2 and nhr-66(yph413) mutants. The numerical labels beneath the heatmap indicate the number of differentially expressed genes between N2 and the nhr-66(yph413) mutant. (See S3 Data for more). (C) Gene ontology enrichment analysis results for genes down-regulated more than 4-fold in the nhr-66(yph413) mutant. (See S3 Data for more). (D) Quantification of nematode escaping rates in wild-type C. elegans (N2), the nhr-66(yph413) mutant, and collagen mutants (mean ± SEM, n is shown below the x-axis, two-tailed unpaired Student t test). (E) Protein structure of collagens used in rescue experiments. Collagens are classified into clusters based on interruptions in their main collagenous domain (blue boxes), with numbers in the boxes indicating the count of Gly-X-Y repeats. All cuticular collagens typically contain cysteine-rich regions (yellow), an N-terminal helical Gly-X-Y repeat (red box), a transmembrane region (pink) or predicted signal peptides (green). (F) Quantification of nematode escaping rates in collagen-rescued nhr-66(yph413) mutants (mean ± SEM, n is shown below the x-axis, two-tailed unpaired Student t test). (G) Fluorescence images and quantification of Pcol-14::GFP reporter expression in N2, the nhr-66(yph413) mutant, and rescued strains (scale bar, 100 µm). Data are presented as the Mean ± SEM (n is shown below the x-axis, two-tailed unpaired Student t test). The data underlying this figure can be found in S3 Data.