Graduation Semester and Year
Fall 2026
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Quantitative Biology
Department
Biology
First Advisor
Piya Ghose
Second Advisor
Esther Betran
Third Advisor
Cara Boutte
Fourth Advisor
Mark Pellegrino
Abstract
Cells may be intrinsically fated to die to sculpt tissues during development or to maintain homeostasis. Cells can also die in response to various stressors, injury or pathological conditions. Additionally, cells of the metazoan body are often highly specialized with distinct domains that differ both structurally and with respect to their neighbors. Cell killing, as well as clearance of different types of cell debris must be performed quickly and efficiently to prevent autoimmunity and secondary necrosis of neighboring cells. Moreover, all cells, including those programmed to die, may be subject to various stressors in their environment. Some largely unexplored questions include whether predestined cell elimination during development could be altered by stress or if specialized cells may need compartment-specific stress-adaptive programs. In my doctoral thesis work, I leveraged Compartmentalized Cell Elimination (CCE) in the nematode C. elegans to explore these questions. CCE is a non-apoptotic developmental cell death program whereby three segments of two embryonic polarized cell types are eliminated differently. In this dissertation, I discuss an adaptive response that our lab found serves to aid developmental phagocytosis as a part of CCE during stress, specifically corpse resolution. I also describe other aspects of corpse recognition and phagosome closure I helped elucidate. Lastly, I discuss the molecular and cell biological insights into the local control of CCE initiation, that in conjunction with my with findings on corpse resolution, lays the groundwork for ongoing and future studies on the role of an adaptive mitochondrial response to stress, formation of ‘donuts’, in developmental cell death initiation. Collectively, my dissertation offers new molecular insights into events at the intersection of adaptive stress responses and normal development.
Keywords
cell death, phagocytosis, stress response, autophagy, C. elegans, corpse resolution, mitochondria, membrane remodeling
Disciplines
Cell Biology | Developmental Biology | Genetics
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Elkhalil, Aladin, "Repurposing Adaptive Responses for Programmed Local Control of Specialized Cell Killing and Corpse Resolution" (2026). Biology Dissertations. 8.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/biology_dissertations2/8