Curious about how the cannibalistic nematode Pristionchus pacificus hunts its prey? Check out our preprint on BioRxiv, where we explore the roles of mechanosensation and chemosensation, using behaviour tracking among other methods!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Two weeks to go until @jameslightfoot.bsky.social lab and I will host some excellent colleagues from around the world at the NWG meeting in Göttingen for Symposium [email protected]!
Be ready for a diverse line up with 🐸 🕷️ 🪱 🪰 under the common umbrella of 'evolution of behavior'!

Fantastic work from the lab of @maxplanck.de colleague Paul Rainey, demonstrating how a locus can evolve to become hypermutable. Mutation rates depend on evolutionary relevance of this evolved locus!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Have you ever wondered what is on the surface of a #nematode like #Celegans?

…it turns out they are surprisingly greasy little critters and covered in many different lipids.

To read more about this, check out the excellent paper from the Chauhan lab which we were very happy to be a small part of.

How hard do bacteria-eating nematodes bite in order to break the bacterial cell wall? Check out our new paper, led by Jason Casar & collab with Jen Dionne, using pressure sensing beads that change color upon compression (bluetorial coming soon) rdcu.be/d5n7v

Institute Christmas party shenanigans 🪱🥳

Are you planning to perform single-copy insertions in C. elegans???
Check out our first lab paper!! 🥳
Our *Universal SKI System* uses just one plasmid that can be inserted into any chromosome! Easy peasy!
#Celegans #CRISPR #worms #research #science #techniques

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

CGC1, a new reference genome for Caenorhabditis elegans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.04.626850v1

Molecular patterns of evolutionary changes throughout the whole nervous system of multiple nematode species https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.23.624988v1

Evolutionary plasticity in nematode Hox gene complements and genomic loci arrangement

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Another fantastic Pristionchus paper, this time from the Yoshida and Sommer labs highlighting the rapid sex chromosome evolution in these nematodes. This includes the evolution of five distinct karyotypes across the Pristionchus genus.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧪 Lab's latest!! Work by PD (and now PI) Alison Philbrook.
C. elegans sensory neurons have gorgeous #cilia. We’ve always thought that a) no cilia = no sensory responses, & b) no IFT = no cilia. Punchline is we thought wrong. Read paper for more!
#neuroscience
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

While Pristionchus pacificus is our main species of interest, there are many amazing Pristionchus out there. Thanks to work from Matthias Herrmann, two more species have been discovered in South Korea bringing the number of Pristionchus to 50 including 8 hermaphrodites! sciendo.com/article/10.2...

Thank you very much for the invite and to everyone who came to listen to my talk @biozentrum.bsky.social! I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about the amazing science taking place and the opportunity to meet so many enthusiastic scientists. Special thanks for the invite from Susan Mango! 🪱

Thank you very much, it was a pleasure to visit and get to talk science and bitey worms with everyone!

Vvvvvvvvvvery excited to have James Lightfoot @jameslightfoot.bsky.social today at the @biozentrum.bsky.social. Predation, worms, evolution, explosions, the whole shebang

Great Pristionchus pacificus paper by the Okumura lab. They investigate its light avoidance behaviour and show some key differences compared to how this functions and has evolved compared to C. elegans!

journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...