High-fat diet

Model Organism: Worms Methods & Reagents
1

Hello,

I wanna feed worms with a high-fat diet and examine the effects to developmental progression. I have seen people using a high % of cholesterol. May I ask if that’s the standard way to artifically increase fat content in worms? Thanks. AngelaL

2

you could get them to ‘super size’ at McDonald’s…

OR…try the following approach from the Jennifer Watts lab:

http://www.jove.com/video/50879/dietary-supplementation-polyunsaturated-fatty-acids-caenorhabditis

Using just cholesterol seems a little narrow to me if you are interested in more general effects on development.

Steve

3

AngelaL,
Unfortunately, its hard to change the macronutrient content of C. elegans diets because they eat bacteria. E. coli don’t have a means to store fat, so all of the dietary lipid
that the worms get is actually E. coli membrane. It is easy to change the fatty acid composition of the membranes, because E. coli seem to like to take up unsaturated fatty acids
and put them in their membrane lipids (shown in the JoVE article that Steve mentioned). However, the amount of membrane in E. coli is limited, so even if you supplement with fatty acid,
the E. coli composition (and hence the worm diet) is still mainly protein.
J. Watts

4

Got it. Thank you very much.

AngelaL

5

but, as Conrad Zimsky said…what if you could…

http://www.broadinstitute.org/annotation/genome/rhodococcus_opacus/MultiHome.html

Apparently, these little beasties can store upto 70% of their own dry mass in sequestered triacylglycerols.

Just a thought.