Research Projects

Obesity is a global healthcare challenge with a complex aetiology and pathophysiology. Despite advancements, obesity remains enigmatic, and drugs developed against it often face issues of efficacy and toxicity. This study aims to use commensal microbiota metabolites to investigate whether they mitigate the adverse effects of obesity across generations. Commensal microbiota regulates various physiological responses and has been linked to health and disease outcomes. Studies have shown a strong association between commensal metabolites and obesity, with indole propionic acids (IPA) being low in obesity patients and alleviating obesity-related complications in mice models. However, no information is available on how these effects transfer from a host to subsequent generations. The study proposes using Caenorhabditis elegans, a robust, in vivo, high-throughput system, to screen commensal metabolites against obesity across generations. The aim is to investigate how indoles produced by commensal microbiota mitigate obesity in worms and mice and decipher the molecular pathways associated with these effects. Discovering the transgenerational effects of commensal microbiota will be a milestone in basic science research, enable therapeutic development, and facilitate the discovery of biomarkers associated with healthy or disease states.