Worms May Function as Drugs for Certain Diseases Depending on Patient's Metabolism

Researchers in Boyce Thompson Institute Professor Frank Schroeder's laboratory and colleagues have used Caenorhabditis elegans, a simple roundworm, as a tractable experimental prototype that can connect differences in genomes to differences in metabolism.

Tearing the diet of a person or medicine based on their genomes has been an objective of the medical community for decades, although the strategy has not been widely successful as people are metabolizing chemicals differently, a Phys.org report specified.

Essentially, a drug may work differently for two sick people as they have different metabolism, which may lead to genetic, microbial, or environmental differences.

Schroeder, the co-corresponding author of the study, explained that "individuals have different metabolism," and that is essential for how different diets, diseases, and drugs affect people.

He added, that there is a need to find out how to tailor biomedical recommendations to different people according to their distinctive metabolism.

Understanding Metabolism

Essentially, understanding a person's metabolism based on its genome is very difficult as a study on humans can never actually be replicated to verify or refute outcomes, Schroeder continued explaining.

The professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Cornell University also said, if one collects data from an individual, he will never get the chance to sample another person of the same genetic background, microbiome, age, and environmental exposure.

This makes it very difficult to untangle genetic traits accountable for different metabolism variants.

The C. elegans roundworm is perfectly suited for the job as its metabolism is surprisingly akin to that of humans, not to mention self-fertilizing hermaphrodites, which enables researchers to acquire thousands of worms that have similar genomes.

20,000 Unique Metabolites Observed

According to a postdoctoral scientist, Bennet Fox from Schroeder's lab and the first author of the paper published in the Nature journal, every variant of C. elegans can be thought of as an extraordinary individual.

The scientist added that another major advantage is the ease of genome editing in the said worm species, which enabled them to experiment directly with gene-editing strains and test hypotheses in living animals.

The study investigators looked at four distinctive worm strains, the standard lab strain, two wild variants from Hawaii, and one wild strain from Taiwan. The tiny creatures were grown under normal conditions at the same developmental stage.

Fox also said, they carried out untargeted analysis using high-resolution mass spectrometry and observed over 20,000 extraordinary metabolites, most of which stay unknown.

Genetic Basis Uncover

The team also showed how to uncover the genetic basis of inter-individual variation of metabolism, which could contribute to the field of personalized medicine living up to its promise, Massachusetts Chan Medical School reported.

The lab of Schroeder, which specializes in biochemistry and identification of unidentified metabolites, worked with the Walhout lab at the University of UMass Chan Medical School and the Anderson Lab at Northwestern University.

The extraordinary synergy and complementary interests of the three laboratories led to this vital step forward for modeling metabolism in different people.

Related information about C. Elegans is shown on Science of Biology's YouTube video:

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