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C. elegans outside the Petri dish.
Elife, 4.
The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans has risen to the status of a top model organismfor biological research in the last fifty years. Among laboratory animals, this tinynematode is one of the simplest and easiest organisms to handle. And its lifeoutside the laboratory is beginning to be unveiled. Like other model organisms, C.elegans has a boom-and-bust lifestyle. It feasts on ephemeral bacterial blooms indecomposing fruits and stems. After resource depletion, its young larvae enter amigratory diapause stage, called the dauer. Organisms known to be associated with C.elegans include migration vectors (such as snails, slugs and isopods) and pathogens(such as microsporidia, fungi, bacteria and viruses). By deepening our understandingof the natural history of C. elegans, we establish a broader context and improvedtools for studying its biology.
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