In this episode, we dive into a milestone in C. elegans systems biology — the first application of SILAC-style metabolic proteome labelling in a whole animal. By feeding worms lysine auxotroph E. coli labelled with heavy lysine (Lys8), researchers enabled quantitative proteomics with precision typically reserved for cell culture.

But it gets better — they made it RNAi compatible, allowing side-by-side comparisons of wild-type vs mutant proteomes in the same run.

We discuss:

How worms were labelled with heavy lysine using auxotrophic E. coli How this enabled 94–97% incorporation of label in just one generation The creation of RNAi-ready NJF01 bacteria for knockdown and labelling Case study: NHR-49 loss alters lipid metabolism proteins at scale Why this approach paves the way for whole-organism proteogenomics

📖 Based on the research article: “Quantitative proteomics by amino acid labeling in C. elegans” Fredens, J., Engholm-Keller, K., Giessing, A., Pultz, D., Larsen, M.R., Højrup, P., Møller-Jensen, J., & Færgeman, N.J. Published in Nature Methods (2011) 🔗 https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1675

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