Latest Caenorhabditis elegans Stories

By Caroline Arbanas, Washington University in St. LouisScientists have decoded the DNA of the parasitic worm that causes trichinosis, a disease linked to eating raw or undercooked pork or carnivorous wild game animals, such as bear and walrus.After analyzing the genome, investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and their collaborators report they have identified unique features of the parasite, Trichinella spiralis, which provide potential targets for new drugs to...

Scientists demonstrate that environmental lithium uptake promotes longevityProfessor Dr. Michael Ristow's team along with Japanese colleagues from universities in Oita and Hiroshima have demonstrated by two independent approaches that even a low concentration of lithium leads to an increased life expectancy in humans as well as in a model organism, the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. The research team presents its results in the online edition of the scientific publication European Journal...

By Michael C. Purdy, Washington University in St. LouisFinding means C. elegans may aid studies of human infectionsA workhorse of modern biology is sick, and scientists couldn't be happier.Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Jacques Monod Institute in France and Cambridge University have found that the nematode C. elegans, a millimeter-long worm used extensively for decades to study many aspects of biology, gets naturally occurring viral infections.The...

Scientists commandeer a freely moving organism's nervous system without wires or electrodesPhysicists and bioengineers have developed an optical instrument allowing them to control the behavior of a worm just by shining a tightly focused beam of light at individual neurons inside the organism.The pioneering optogenetic research, by a team at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is described this week in the journal Nature...

It's just a worm, a tiny soil-dwelling nematode worm "“ but the implications are big for biomedicine and circadian biology as shown in a recent study authored by University of Nevada, Reno researcher Alexander van der Linden. The article on the circadian clock of the Caenorhabditis elegans worm was published in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal, PLoS Biology."Circadian rhythms are important in all organisms because they regulate biological functions such as food intake, temperature,...

A gene's location on a chromosome plays a significant role in shaping how an organism's traits vary and evolve, according to findings by genome biologists at New York University's Center for Genomic and Systems Biology and Princeton University's Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. Their research, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Science, suggests that evolution is less a function of what a physical trait is and more a result of where the genes that affect that...

In worms as in women, fertility declines at a rate that far exceeds the onset of other aging signs. And now a new report in the October 15th issue of Cell, a Cell Press publication, suggests that worms' and humans' biological clocks may wind down over time for similar underlying reasons."For us, what's most important is that there are so many shared genes involved," said Coleen Murphy of Princeton University. "This isn't just about worms and how they reproduce." That such...

A faster way to look for drugs that regenerate nerve cellsScientists have long sought the ability to regenerate nerve cells, or neurons, which could offer a new way to treat spinal-cord damage as well as neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. Many chemicals can regenerate neurons grown in Petri dishes in the lab, but it's difficult and time-consuming to identify those chemicals that work in live animals, which is critical for developing drugs for humans.Engineers at MIT...

Basiru Leigh is conducting research on motor neuron disease in the Columbia University lab of Oliver Hobert, thanks to an NSF-supported Harlem Children Society science and engineering mentoring programBasiru Leigh peers into a microscope in the lab of Oliver Hobert of Columbia University in New York. Leigh is examining mutant ground worms from a species known as C. elegans."There! You see?" he exclaimed. "They are moving abnormally--in a circle instead of a U-shape." This...

Max Planck researchers have uncovered an ingenious evolutionary trick: a signaling chain is allocated several functions, enabling optimal adaptation to environmental conditionsDramatic scenes are played out under Ralf Sommer's microscope: his research object, the roundworm Pristionchus pacificus, bites another worm, tears open a hole in its side and devours the oozing contents. The squirming victim does not stand a chance in this duel: Caenorhabditis elegans may be a close relative of...