WOrM Podcast: Whole Organism Analytics Podcast20 Elo 2025

EPISODE 25: Heavy Worms, Light Data – Proteomics Gets Personal in C. elegans

In this episode, we dive into a milestone in C. elegans systems biology — the first application of SILAC-style metabolic proteome labelling in a whole animal. By feeding worms lysine auxotroph E. coli labelled with heavy lysine (Lys8), researchers enabled quantitative proteomics with precision typically reserved for cell culture.

But it gets better — they made it RNAi compatible, allowing side-by-side comparisons of wild-type vs mutant proteomes in the same run.

We discuss:

How worms were labelled with heavy lysine using auxotrophic E. coli
How this enabled 94–97% incorporation of label in just one generation
The creation of RNAi-ready NJF01 bacteria for knockdown and labelling
Case study: NHR-49 loss alters lipid metabolism proteins at scale
Why this approach paves the way for whole-organism proteogenomics

📖 Based on the research article:

“Quantitative proteomics by amino acid labeling in C. elegans”

Fredens, J., Engholm-Keller, K., Giessing, A., Pultz, D., Larsen, M.R., Højrup, P., Møller-Jensen, J., & Færgeman, N.J.

Published in Nature Methods (2011)

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1675

🎧 Subscribe to the WOrM Podcast for more full-organism breakthroughs in metabolism, proteomics, and systems biology!

This podcast is generated with artificial intelligence and curated by Veeren. If you’d like your publication featured on the show, please get in touch.

📩 More info:

🔗 ⁠⁠www.veerenchauhan.com⁠⁠

📧 veeren.chauhan@nottingham.ac.uk

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Jaksot(53)

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