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| Lucia Carvelli in her laboratory. |
So what does British rock-’n’-roll bad boy Ozzy Osbourne share with the lowly nematode
C. elegans?
Well, nothing really, except that this minuscule, transparent worm could clue us in on why Osbourne survived after years of flagrant alcohol and drug abuse.
“Osbourne will be studied by research teams and physicians at the Cambridge, Mass.-based company Knome, which provides whole genome sequencing and interpretation services to researchers and families, to find out if there’s a genetic component to his survival,” said Dr. Lucia Carvelli, a pharmacologist who recently joined Dr. Jonathan Geiger’s team at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences Department of Pharmacology, Physiology, and Therapeutics.
Carvelli, who grew up in Milan, Italy, is working with C. elegans to detail exactly what amphetamines, cocaine, and other addictive drugs do at the molecular level in the brain.
