Scientists Conduct Exercise Class For Worms To Find Parkinson’s Treatment
By Mikelle Leow, 01 Mar 2023
Some unexpected fitness buffs have wriggled their way into gym class, though they’d be forgiven for missing leg day.
To examine the effects of exercise on cognitive deterioration, and hopefully replicate those results in a future drug to treat Parkinson’s disease, biologists and engineers at the University of Colorado at Boulder recently hosted an exercise session for tiny worms called Caenorhabditis elegans.
Observing exercise in human patients isn’t always practical, seeing as how many people diagnosed with Parkinson’s are elderly and may not be physically fit to work out. So the team turned to the swimming nematode worms, which are great micro models for the human brain due to their similar cellular pathways. All this is despite the fact that C. elegans only measures one millimeter long and has just 302 neurons, as opposed to the billions in a human brain.
The scientists built a so-called “gym-in-a-chip,” which they have dubbed the ‘Acoustic Gym’, that uses sound waves to create slow, gentle whirlpools in a dish filled with some liquid.
They then dropped the worms into the well, prompting the participants to swim in circles and against the current. The team notes that the routine isn’t harmful to the worms.
Although the itty-bitty facility is only about the size of a quarter, it’s “equivalent to how large a swimming pool is for humans,” expresses co-author Xiaoyun Ding, assistant professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering. The team’s research has been outlined in a new paper published in the Science Advances journal.
Ding Xue, one of the group’s researchers and a professor in the university’s Department of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology (MCDB), has been inspired to explore the effectiveness of exercise in the brain ever since he watched a news story about a man’s Parkinson’s symptoms improving after he had gone out on a bicycle ride.
“After a bike ride, this patient suddenly became much more stable, and he was able to hold objects better,” Xue recounts. “I thought: ‘Maybe we could do something with that.’”
There were two types of worms in the pool. One was the control, while the other group was genetically engineered to simulate human neurologic illnesses and had neurons that degraded over time. Interestingly, with exercise, their rate of losing those nervous-system cells was slowed down.
Then again, the right amount of exercise is key.
“Too little or too much exercise doesn’t achieve the beneficial effect,” reports Xue. “There’s a sweet spot.”
For example, the scientists didn’t notice improvements when the subjects were made to swim for only two minutes, or even as long as 10 minutes.
The sweet spot for the worms turned out to be a five-minute swim session per day for two days, which reduced the decline of neurons in C. elegans by 28%, on average.
Moving forward, the team plans to reuse their gym-on-a-chip to spearhead the discovery of new drugs that may provide Parkinson’s patients with the mental benefits of exercise—without the physical strain.
“For the first time, we have a platform to begin screening for drugs that could, for example, replace the beneficial effects of exercise,” concludes Xue said. “That could be really good for elderly people or others who aren’t able to exercise.”
[via Phys.org and Science.org, images via various sources]