Worms, Parasites, and Scrolls: Oded Rechavi and the Art of Radical Science

Dr. Oded Rechavi likes big ideas. “I am often more interested in ideas that startle, that bring you out of your comfort zone, or that are the opposite of what people think,” Rechavi shares in our most recent episode of Big Biology. “It keeps me interested in the science,” he says. “And I think it’s a starting point for finding interesting projects. If more than 10 percent of your experiments work, then you’re probably doing something not that interesting.”

So far, Rechavi has had no shortage of interesting projects. Much of his work focuses on the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, which he uses to study the transgenerational inheritance of small, non-coding RNA molecules. These non-coding RNAs are “short sequences of RNA, typically between 20 and 30 nucleotides long, but there’s some variation,” explains Rechavi. “And what they do is regulate gene activity, in almost all cases, by inhibiting gene expression.”

Rechavi’s lab has shown that these non-coding RNAs can carry information about an organism’s experiences—such as starvation or viral infection—across multiple generations. In other words, the offspring of a C. elegans worm exposed to stressors can inherit molecular “memories” of those experiences and alter their own gene expression accordingly.

These findings highlight how epigenetic inheritance can influence biology beyond the DNA sequence. By showing that environmental factors can shape gene regulation in future generations, Rechavi’s work expands our understanding of heredity and raises new questions about how organisms adapt. You can hear Rechavi talk more about this line of work in our most recent episode.

Rechavi’s work with C. elegans is far from being his only unusual research project. In one especially surprising study, his team repurposed the parasite Toxoplasma gondii—best-known for infecting the brains of humans and other animals—as a tool for delivering therapeutic proteins to neurons.

One of the ways that T. gondii can infect the brain is by directly crossing the blood-brain barrier and using specialized organelles to secrete proteins into host cells. By engineering the parasite’s natural secretion system, the researchers were able to direct it to carry and release desirable proteins inside brain cells. This modification required reprogramming Toxoplasma’s complex machinery so that, instead of injecting its own virulence factors into host cells, it could deliver carefully chosen therapeutic proteins. The team demonstrated that the modified parasites could successfully enter neurons and secrete multiple large proteins,