A Worm's Word

First symptoms of the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) include limb weakness and loss of muscle control, worsening as death of brain and nervous system cells progresses. It’s the most common form of motor neuron disease, with an estimated 1,700 people in the UK being diagnosed annually, and has a life expectancy of two to five years. Here, innovative imaging and behaviour quantification techniques are being used to study the molecular mechanisms of ALS in a worm model bearing a gene mutation like that underlying a form of the human disease. Compared to control worms (top) proteins implicated in ALS accumulate in the worm model (red, lower panel). Observing neurodegeneration and locomotor defects in these worms allows comparison with ALS observations in humans. Translating this research into the clinic could provide novel treatments for ALS patients and generating other such worm models could also help unpick the complex molecular basis for a myriad of rare genetic diseases. 

Research in collaboration with the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences' Behavioural Phenomics group

Written by Daniella Gimbosh

Daniella Gimbosh

Science Communications Assistant and writer

Daniella is a third year Medical Biosciences undergraduate at Imperial College London. She is currently on placement as a Science Communications Assistant within the GECo team at the MRC London Institute of Medical Science.

• Image from work by Yoshifumi Sonobe and colleagues
• The Grossman Institute for Neuroscience, Quantitative Biology, and Human Behavior, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, November 2021