Understanding how nerves regenerate is an important step towards developing treatments for human neurological disease¹, but investigation has so far been limited to complex organisms (mouse and zebrafish²) in the absence of precision techniques for severing axons (axotomy). Here we use femtosecond laser surgery for axotomy in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans and show that these axons functionally regenerate after the operation. Application of this precise surgical technique should enable nerve regeneration to be studied in vivo in its most evolutionarily simple form.

1. Department of Applied Physics, Ginzton Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA
2. Department of MCD Biology, Sinsheimer Laboratories, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
3. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
4. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA

Correspondence to: Adela Ben-Yakar^1,4 Email: ben-yakar@mail.utexas.edu

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