You are a young researcher at the National Institute Health. You are very intere
ID: 32728 • Letter: Y
Question
You are a young researcher at the National Institute Health. You are very interested in a new drug that has the potential to decrease blood cholesterol by inhibiting the enzyme in liver cells that is the key step in making LDLs.
Of the following model system, which would you find useful in your studies and which ones would not be useful. For those you find useful describe in a few words what kind of studies can be accomplished? Explain your answer.
a)E. coli
b)Yeast
c)Drosophila
d)Mouse
e)C. elegans
f)Cell Culture
Explanation / Answer
Ok, this is my favorite Q to answer:-
A new drug which may lower blood cholesterol....this means
during your experiments you need to measure blood cholesterol levels, therefore the best organism is a mouse in whose blood you can stadardize the drug's efficacy. Second advantage of using mouse is you can perform high thoroughput translational studies, the cholesterol metabolism can be studied at an organism level, being mouse the closest to human as a research model is the best advantage. Then when we can check pathological conditions and imaging for location of drugs and pharmako-kinetics, survival etc can be done. One can go for clinical studies after a success in mouse.
c.elegans and drosophilla are not useful in the above manner. It does not have a liver. and except ergosterol not much cholesterol is synthesized.
Yeast, and e.coli have the same restrictions and these systems are good enough to engineer genes to produces large quantities of enzyme.e.g. insulin.
Cell culture using human cell lines or primary cells useful before going to the in vivo system like mouse, one can perform a few of the task e.g. to test the drug for toxicity (offcourse the same tests have to be repeated in mouse also), & its affects on different pathways effecting cell health and metabolism, expression of stress response gene and proteins can be looked into cell lines.
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