Assessing the Combined Effects of Heat Stress and Nutrition Deficiency and their Effect on Long Term Potentiation in \u3cem\u3eCaenorhabditis Elegans\u3c/em\u3e

Rising temperatures and famine has led to many people suffering physically, however, there are also possible neurological reasons why these people are unable to perform as well as others. The purpose of this study was to test whether heat shock and starvation had any combined effect on memory retention in C. elegans. It was hypothesized that if C. elegans were exposed to the combined effects of increased heat stress and decreased nutrition levels, then the overall number of C. elegans that were trained with the information would be reduced by more than 50%. Experimentation was accomplished by splitting the nematodes into the three temperature groups: 20°C, 27.5°C, 30°C. Each temperature group was then split into either normal food or starvation. Within each of these groups, the nematodes were first trained to remember which arms in a radial arm maze to go to, and were later exposed to the heat shock and starvation. Then, they were tested to see if they were able to retain the information by being placed back into the radial arm maze. A two-way ANOVA test was run to test the difference in the means, and was proven to have a difference in temperature, but not in heat shock at = 0.05. The p value for temperature was \u3c0.001, however, the p value for heat shock was 0.044. Therefore, the hypothesis was supported and as the temperature and starvation increased, the number of C. elegans to actually have retained the information decreased