Hi,
just to get the ball rolling here, as you posed a question and (at least) 85 people have not come forward with anything.
As a way of making people reply, I’ll give you a theoretical viewpoint (I haven’t used heat shock promoters in the way you describe), which should bring out the experimentalists to give me a kicking and you some advice.
Two papers, both alike in dignity (to misquote Shakespeare) and in the public domain:
http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v1/n6/pdf/100058.pdf
http://genesdev.cshlp.org/content/12/13/1962.full.pdf+html
The former reviews the role of heat shock proteins in mice and worms…reiterates that there seems to be a clear longevity effect (a plus point for your research), but also that this effect is complex (still a plus point for your research).
What I find interesting is the idea that different tissue/organ systems exhibit differential responses to heat shock (in terms of extending lifespan), it is not all on the +ve side.
That leads me to the latter of the two papers. It’s from Dr. Heat Shock’s group (Richard Morimoto) and considers the role of a heat shock binding protein that negatively regulates heat shock protein binding (strange eh?). Anyway, over-expressing it off a tissue specific (muscle) promoter in worms shuts down a heat shock-inducible construct hsp16::lacZ in the same tissue but not in other tissues where it is normally expressed.
Thus, (and here’s the bit where people start getting itchy fingers to write NNOOOOOOOO), I wonder if you might have to ‘just do the time’ and test the expression of your heat shock promoter constructs tissue for tissue over the adult period? It could be, that some tissues express HSBP-1 and effectively block the heat shock response in older worms in certain tissues but not others beacuse it’s advantageous to do so?
One example, drawn admittedly from work with mice, is that the effects of heat shock proteins on longevity seem to be more pronounced in certain tissues such as cardiac tissue than in others.
steve
What about starting with hsp16 (nerve ring, pharynx, intestine, body wall muscles)?