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Caenorhabditis elegans is a species of soil-dwelling nematode (roundworm) used as a model organism in molecular genetics and developmental biology. It is predominantly hermaphroditic (can self-fertilize) and it is transparent, allowing the position and fate of every cell in the body to be mapped.
Extracellular vesicles are fundamental in cellular communication. Here, authors show how C. elegans pheromones regulate vesicle production, showcasing the impact of social behaviors on cellular mechanisms.
Fatty acid desaturation is central to metazoan lipid metabolism. Here, using C. elegans as a model, the authors show that both endogenous and microbiota-dependent small molecule signals converge to promote lipid desaturation via the nuclear receptor NHR-49/PPARα.
Untargeted comparative metabolomics revealed N-acylspermidines as conserved metabolites downstream of mitochondrial sirtuins that provide direct evidence for their in vivo deacylation functions and may contribute to sirtuin-dependent phenotypes.
Host-parasite interactions can lead to negative frequency-dependent selection. Here, the authors sequence the genomes of H. bakeri and H. polygyrus, parasites of house and wood mice, respectively, and find that proteins that interact with the host immune response are often highly diverse.
Somatic cells in C. elegans stop dividing after completing their normal lineage at the end of development. Here, Heinze et al. show that constitutive expression of a hox gene prolongs proliferation beyond the restriction imposed by the cell lineage.
Sirtuins remove post-translationally added acyl groups from protein lysines. New work shows the surprising metabolic fate of acyl groups removed from mitochondrial proteins—they react nonenzymatically with essential polyamine spermidine, forming previously unknown monoacylated N-glutarylspermidines and diacylated N-glutaryl,N-acetylspermidines.
Unbiased metabolomics revealed the conversion of serotonin into N-acetylserotonin-derived glucosides by an intestinal carboxylesterase in Caenorhabditis elegans, which suggests an unappreciated role of the gut in modulating 5-HT signaling.
In Caenorhabditis elegans, RNAi-initiated gene silencing can persist for multiple generations. A study shows that this heritable silencing requires parallel contributions of both a nuclear transcriptional silencing pathway and perinuclear condensate-localized poly(UG)-tailed transcripts to produce abundant germline siRNAs in adult progeny.
Epigenetic inheritance is the transfer of non-DNA information across generations. A new study identifies sperm-specific PEI granules as essential for paternal epigenetic inheritance. PEI granule partitioning to sperm requires palmitoylation and myosin VI activity, suggesting lipidation-dependent granule transport on vesicles.