Author(s): Emily Mellon, Violet Czech, Kirsten Sumampong, Hailey Kim
Mentor(s): Anne Gibson
Institution Westminster
Abstract: Nicotine is the second most commonly abused drug in the United States. Each year, cigarette smoking causes over 480,000 preventable deaths, making it the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. It also costs the United States over $600 billion a year in healthcare expenditure and lost productivity. However, current treatments for nicotine addiction remain insufficient, with success rates under 10%. In order to develop more effective nicotine pharmacotherapies, a better understanding of nicotine addiction and a high throughput approach for screening potential treatments are both needed. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) provides an efficient, low-cost, and effective animal model to characterize neural mechanisms of drug preference. This project therefore used a chemotaxis preference assay to assess nicotine preference in C. elegans. C. elegans were pretreated with various drugs hypothesized to influence nicotine preference including N-acetylcysteine (NAC, 5mM), naloxone (1mM), ethanol (300mM), DOI (500µM) and L-DOPA (20mM). A chemotaxis preference assay was then used to evaluate preference for 0, 10, 30 and 50mM nicotine. C. elegans show a dose-dependent preference for nicotine. However, L-DOPA and naloxone both decrease this nicotine preference. Preliminary data also suggests that DOI decreases nicotine preference at lower mM doses of nicotine. NAC did not affect nicotine preference, and chronic ethanol exposure increased nicotine preference in C. elegans.