Watertown Bio Journal Club: Using Wearables to Measure ALS Progression

Plus science photography and more plastic-eating bacteria engineering

Watertown Bio Journal Club is a monthly publication highlighting the scientific research produced by labs in Watertown. If you’re a Watertown-based biotech and have a recently published article, pre-print, or conference publication you would like featured in our next issue, reach out at newsletter@watertown.bio. If you enjoy our publications consider supporting us.

Featured Article: Short prescribed exercises can quantify upper limb functioning in neurodegenerative disease

Our featured article, published in Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation by Watertown-headquartered ALS Therapy Development Institute (a non-profit research institute based at 480 Arsenal Way) and Massachusetts General Hospital evaluated the use of short at home arm exercises to track ALS disease progression. Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease), is a neurodegenerative condition characterized by the progressive loss of motor neurons, leading to muscle weakness, loss of movement, and ultimately death. The standard for ALS progression tracking is the revised ALS Functional Rating Scale (ALSFRS-r), which is a survey administered to the patient evaluating their ability to complete 12 different tasks, such as speaking, swallowing and walking. While clinically validated, the ALSFRS-r is limited because it requires an observer’s assessment of the patient, which may vary from observer to observer.

To address the limitations of the ALSFRS-r, the ALS TDI is working to develop quantitative metrics of ALS disease progression by measuring arm and leg movements from wearable accelerometer data, submitted by ALS patients through their long term ALS Research Collaborative Study (ARC), which was rapidly expanded by funds received from the Ice Bucket Challenge. In this most recent work, the researchers developed a 5 minute exercise routine to assess the patient’s upper limb function. They found that three metrics: exercise duration, intensity, and similarity, were significantly associated with ALS Disease progression as measured by the ALSFRS-r, consistent with previous work measuring continuous limb movements with accelerometers. The short exercise routine developed in this study improves on the previous work by reducing continuous limb movement monitoring to a 5-minute curated exercise routine, making it easier for patients to follow monitoring protocols. While a strong proof of concept, the researchers mention that future work is needed to incorporate the patient’s perspective to correlate significant changes in exercise routine metrics with functional measures that are meaningful for the patient, as well as refinements to the exercise routine to yield the most predictive values for clinical trials while balancing the burden on a patient.

Bonus: Read more about an ALS TDI Researcher’s microimaging work that won runner up in the Royal Society’s 2025 Photography Competition.

Featured Pre-print: A scalable transposon mutagenesis system for non-model bacteria

In this work published on Biorxiv,  Cultivarium (based at the Linx Building), describes a new transposon library to quickly conduct functional genomics experiments in non-model bacterial organisms. As described in their accompanying blog article, the team set out to close the gap between genome sequencing which is fast and cheap, and confirmatory gene knockout studies to identify gene function. They developed a library to quickly identify top performing transposon elements for gene knockout in a given organism. They tested their tools in 43 bacterial strains, demonstrating its utility across multiple bacterial phyla. They showcased their tools using the bacterium Comamonas testosteroni, where they screened their library in the bacteria to identify a useful transposon element, and then systematically generated knockout variants to identify the bacterium’s PET plastic and lignin degradation pathways. This is their second such work in the last few months using a PET plastic degrading bacterium as a model organism. It would be interesting to see their efforts combined with Biolabs’ Alumnus Breaking, whose research focuses on working with non-model bacteria to degrade and recycle plastic to produce a biotech/cleantech solution to our growing plastic waste challenges.

That’s all the science news this month!