Hello, my name is TMAU or Trimethylaminuria, at the beginning, James, my host, was born out of two people, his mother and his father, each of them had me in them, but they weren’t affected by me. What ended up happening instead, was they passed me on to James.
Poor James, unfortunately he was affected by me. His mom and dad have these two genes and these two genes when mixed together have different chances to give him this syndrome or not, unfortunately, he got unlucky. Normally his body would convert the fishy smelling trimethylamine into trimethylamine N-oxide which has no odor, unfortunately his body just skips the step where it turns the fishy smelling stuff into the no odor stuff. The FMO3 gene is the cause of this whole problem, when it is mutated it affects the transformation from fishy odor to no odor.
When James eats any form of protein, instead of it having no odor, it smells like fish, so James can’t eat at school because he is afraid others will pick on him. James is one of the unlucky people in the world, he can’t go anywhere without smelling like fish, if he wants to try and hide it, he will smell like whatever he hides it with, but it will be WAY to strong, because of how much he puts on himself.
As a kid James went to school, but later on in life, the kids started to become older, and the realized how he smelt, some of them didn’t mind it some of them liked him but some of them didn’t like the smell at all, but it’s okay, James had a group of friends he could trust, his DNA caused him to smell bad, and a lot of the times people would complain about the smell without knowing it was a human. When they realized it was a human, they tried to act like It didn’t bother them, but James knew it did. Even though he had a group of friends he could trust with his life, he still couldn’t help feeling bad about how he smelt, he tried everything to get rid of the fish stink. He put on after shave, spray deodorant, and even cologne. Even though none of it worked, he still had hope. Poor, poor James.
The saddest part was that James, not only had to live with it now, but even when he is older, what he figured out, early on in life, was that there is no cure for TMAU, he would smell like that for the rest of his life, there wasn’t even a treatment for it. There are ways of avoiding the fishy odor, such as, avoiding foods like, egg yolks, legumes, red meats, fish, beans. Taking low doses of antibiotics such as neomycin and metronidazole. Using slightly acidic detergent.
One day, James hopes to grow up, become a scientist and find a cure for this syndrome. Although I live inside of him, and I’m the thing he is trying to cure. I still cheer him on, hoping one day he can cure me, and be free of this smell.
There were four main questions that I asked myself.
1) What happened to TMAU as a gene?
2) What caused TMAU’s mutation?
3) What effects did TMAU have on its host’s body?
4) How was the host’s life affected?
5) What was their story?
I used Wikipedia and Word. I know these things quite well, so I just decided to stick with what I know instead of trying new things for this project.
I searched it up, read through it and then used my imagination to write up a story.
I searched up some more on different websites just to make sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethylaminuria http://dmd.aspetjournals.org/content/29/4/517.long http://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/trimethylaminuria/
I researched ahead of time, then I wrote some of the facts into a story I made up about a kid with this syndrome. I probably could have researched a little harder on this topic.
