Funding outcome

We are made up of trillions of cells where each contain various chemical micro­factories called organelles that specializes in its function. One of these organelles, the lipid droplet (LD), functions to store and supply fat molecules. These fat molecules act as raw materials in other organelles such as peroxisomes that make components necessary for our organs to function properly. Unfortunately, about 1/40000 babies are born with defects in genes that control peroxisome production and suffer from severe mental disabilities and shortened lifespan that have no effective treatments. These symptoms occur as a buildup of toxic fat molecules that are not processed by peroxisomes and depletion of other downstream molecules used by other organelles. By using fruit flies, we have identified that two of those genes involved in peroxisome production are also important for depositing fat as LDs in flies. I have also found that one of them may function variably at the LDs for different peroxisome-­deficient patients, which may cause different raw fat materials to build up or deplete. In fact, it was shown using a specific peroxisome-­deficient fruit flies that supplementing depleted fat molecules in diet improved a neurological condition and improved survival rate while supplying them with an unaffected fat molecule worsened its lifespan. We will investigate whether these two newly identified genes have a role in deciding which fat molecules to accumulate or be depleted in different peroxisome-­deficient flies. We will validate it by feeding them with different fat materials to see any positive or negative changes in their physiological conditions.