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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.
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.
Wang et al. show that intestinal sphingosine-1-phosphate is transferred to oocytes and influences sphingolipid metabolism in the next generations. In the offspring, sphingosine-1-phosphate protects Caenorhabditis elegans neurons against axon fragility.
In contrast to mammalian cells, C. elegans models can be useful because of cells being post-mitotic in adults. Here the authors show activation of the p38 pathway in cisplatin resistant adult animals and characterise the proteins upstream and downstream of the p38 MAPK signalling pathway that are involved in the cisplatin response.
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.
