WormJam: A consensusC. elegansMetabolic Reconstruction and Metabolomics Community and Workshop Series

Abstract

A GENiE (EU COST action, www.worm-genie.eu) workshop was held at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK on April 19 and 20, 2017, to discuss global challenges around Caenorhabditis elegans metabolic reconstructions and metabolomics (http://www.babraham.ac.uk/genie-workshop). This short report describes the outcomes from that workshop, notably the initiation of a global community to collaboratively discover and describe the metabolism of C. elegans.

C. elegans is a well established workhorse for research in both fundamental biology and medicine, with applications including developmental biology, ageing-associated research and the elucidation of pathomechanisms of diseases.1Corsi AK, Wightman B, Chalfie M. A transparent window into biology: A primer on Caenorhabditis elegans. Genetics. 2015;200(2):387-407. doi:10.1534/genetics.115.176099. PMID:26088431 [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar] Powerful molecular as well as genetic tools, ease of cultivation, short generation times and a considerable overlap in its fundamental biology with higher organisms, make C. elegans an ideal object of study. In recent years, metabolism is increasingly recognised as an important contributor to C. elegans healthspan and lifespan, as well as the basis of adaptation to different environments.2,3 Most of the historical efforts to detect changes in metabolism have been based on molecular tools including gene expression and/or reporter strains. Despite its importance for a large number of research applications, efforts to reconstruct the global map of C. elegans metabolism only started recently, notably with the publication of two independent constraint-based metabolic models last year4,5 (although automated reconstructions from pathway databases were produced before.6) Such whole-genome metabolic reconstructions are a key ingredient for a large number of applications including the integration of diverse -omics datasets, investigation of disease-associated changes in metabolism, studying the responses to nutritional interventions, identifying gene-environment interactions, and elucidating inter-organismal interactions on the metabolic level at both physiological and evolutionary timescales.7 The reconstruction of C. elegans metabolism thus promises to open up the extensive toolbox of constraint-based modelling for C. elegans research.