Figure 5

Autophagy study in wild-type and the feeding defective mutants eat-3 , pha-2 and pha-3. Worms transgenic for the autophagy marker lgg-1::gfp were studied at the L3 stage. (A) Expression of lgg-1::gfp in the seam cells is diffuse in wild-type with few punctate areas. In the feeding defective mutants represented here by eat-3, many GFP-positive punctate areas are found in the cytoplasm of the seam cells (some are indicated by arrows). (B) lgg-1::gfp positive punctate areas (preautophagosomal and autophagosomal structures) were counted in the hypodermal seam cells in at least 50 cells per strain, error bars represents the standard error of the mean. (C) The diameter of lgg-1::gfp positive seam cells was measured from photographs using the ImageJ software as in Fig. 2. At least 40 cells were scored for each strain. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean.