Month: September 2022

BACTERIAL ANALOGY. “The conserved nature of ascaroside signaling is evocative of bacterial quorum sensing, where acyl homoserine lactones (AHLs) are both produced and sensed by many species of gram-negative bacteria. AHLs are based on a small invariable core structure, the homoserine lactone, which bears a fatty-acid-derived side chain featuring species-specific chemical modifications.” https://lnkd.in/d6G6mZ9 View in LinkedIn

WORD ORGANIZATION. “Ascarosides are organized in a very similar fashion, because they are all based on the dideoxy-sugar ascarylose and feature variations in the attached fatty-acid-derived side chain. Analogous to bacterial AHL signaling, different nematode species produce and respond to specific combinations of ascarosides. Based on recent findings describing modular assembly of ascaroside structures from a diverse array of biosynthetic building blocks, it is likely that many additional ascaroside structures exist in nematodes, perhaps also in species we analyzed in this study.” https://lnkd.in/d6G6mZ9 View in LinkedIn

LEGO SETS. “Our ongoing research also revealed that nematodes produce a large diversity of additional compounds by the combinatorial assembly of building blocks from primary and secondary metabolic pathways.” https://lnkd.in/d4DhYhz View in LinkedIn

PRESENT IN METAZOANS? “Considering that the various building blocks are highly conserved throughout the animal kingdom, it appears possible that similar strategies to create complex modular structures through combinatorial assembly of primary metabolites are not only prevalent among nematodes, but present in metazoans in general.” https://lnkd.in/d4DhYhz View in LinkedIn

DIVERSE SET. “The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans uses simple building blocks from primary metabolism and a strategy of modular assembly to build a great diversity of signaling molecules, the ascarosides, which function as a chemical language in this model organism.” https://lnkd.in/dHBmzX9 View in LinkedIn

BASIC BUILDING BLOCK. “In the ascarosides, the dideoxysugar ascarylose serves as a scaffold to which diverse moieties from lipid, amino acid, neurotransmitter, and nucleoside metabolism are attached” https://lnkd.in/dHBmzX9 View in LinkedIn

THE HOW IS MISSING. ““The mechanisms that underlie the highly specific assembly of ascarosides are not understood. We show that the acyl‐CoA synthetase ACS‐7, which localizes to lysosome‐related organelles, is specifically required for the attachment of different building blocks to the 4′‐position of ascr#9.” https://lnkd.in/dHBmzX9 View in LinkedIn

BIOSYNTHETIC HUB. “We further show that mutants lacking lysosome‐related organelles are defective in the production of all 4′‐modified ascarosides, thus identifying the waste disposal system of the cell as a hotspot for ascaroside biosynthesis.” https://lnkd.in/dHBmzX9 View in LinkedIn

UNKNOWN “Ascarosides comprise a family of small signaling molecules that have been shown to regulate important events and behaviors in the life history of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Although the different roles of individual ascarosides appear to be determined by the variances in chemical structure, the mechanisms by which ascarosides are synthesized as well as the locations in which ascarosides are produced within the worm are largely unknown.” https://lnkd.in/dGAHbZv View in LinkedIn

CHRISTMAS TREE DECORATIONS. “Downstream of the canonical β-oxidation cycle the basic ascarosides can undergo various species-specific modifications, thus giving rise to a large diversity of unique signaling molecules that represent the chemical language of nematodes.” https://lnkd.in/d4DhYhz View in LinkedIn