A robust and miniaturized screening platform to study natural products affecting metabolism and survival in Caenorhabditis elegans
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Judith M. Rollinger; Theresa Lehner; Ammar Tahir; Benjamin Kirchweger; Dagmar Pretsch; Julia Zwirchmayr
- Source
- Scientific Reports, Vol 10, Iss 1, Pp 1-12 (2020)
Scientific Reports
- Subject
- 0301 basic medicine
Phenotypic screening
Science
Computational biology
Gardenia jasminoides
Article
03 medical and health sciences
chemistry.chemical_compound
0302 clinical medicine
In vivo
Animals
Mass Screening
Dimethyl Sulfoxide
Healthy aging
Caenorhabditis elegans
Biological Products
Natural products
Miniaturization
Multidisciplinary
biology
Plant Extracts
Drug discovery
Nile red
Metabolism
biology.organism_classification
Survival Analysis
Phenotype
030104 developmental biology
chemistry
Inonotus obliquus
Medicine
Biological Assay
Agaricales
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
- Language
- English
- ISSN
- 2045-2322
In this study a robust, whole organism screening based on Caenorhabditis elegans is presented for the discovery of natural products (NP) with beneficial effects against obesity and age-related diseases. Several parameters of the elaborated workflow were optimized to be adapted for probing multicomponent mixtures combining knowledge from traditional medicine and NP chemistry by generating optimized small-scale extracts considering scarcity of the natural source, solubility issues, and potential assay interferences. The established miniaturized assay protocol allows for in vivo probing of small amounts of even complex samples (~ 1 mg) to test their ability to increase the nematodes’ survival time and the suppression of fat accumulation assessed by Nile red staining as hall marks of “healthy aging”. The workflow was applied on 24 herbal and fungal materials traditionally used against symptoms of the metabolic syndrome and revealed promising results for the extracts of Gardenia jasminoides fruits and the sclerotia from Inonotus obliquus. Tested at 100 µg/mL they were able to significantly reduce the Nile red fluorescence and extend the 50% survival rate (DT50) compared to the control groups. This phenotype-directed in vivo approach opens up new horizons for the selection of natural starting materials and the investigation of their active principles as fast drug discovery tool with predictive value for human diseases.