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Developmental biology

The worm keeps turning

Nature volume 390, pages 228–229 (1997)Cite this article

Who scapes the lurking serpent's mortal sting? Not he that sets his foot upon her back. Even the smallest of worms will turn, when trodden on1.

The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans is one of the most important models for the study of animal development. It is unique in that the generation of all 558 cells of a newly hatched roundworm larva from a few embryonic founder cells is invariant. The description of this process, a monumental effort undertaken by Sulston and colleagues2, required seven years of patient peering through a microscope, repeatedly observing embryonic cell divisions and carefully recording the positions of nuclei — as small as 1 μm in diameter — in hundreds of embryos. The way that the embryonic founder cells generate all the different cell lineages of an entire roundworm is truly invariant: every division axis, every slight asymmetry in cell size and every contact made with another cell is indistinguishable from one embryo to the next, with very few exceptions. On page 294of this issue Kaletta et al.3 provide the first genetic evidence that a single mechanism may operate throughout the C. elegans embryo to maintain the invariance of all cell lineages.

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Figure 1: Transformation of embryonic cells from a posterior to an anterior fate in lit-1 mutant embryos.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Institute of Molecular Biology, University of Oregon, Eugene, 97403, Oregon, USA

    Bruce Bowerman

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  1. Bruce Bowerman
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Bowerman, B. The worm keeps turning. Nature 390, 228–229 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/36725

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