Clusters of homeobox-containing HOM-C/hox genes determine the morphology of animal body plans and body parts and are thought to mediate positional information. Here, we describe the onset of embryonic expression of ceh-13, the Caenorhabditis elegans orthologue of the Drosophila labial gene, which is the earliest gene of the C. elegans Hox gene cluster to be activated in C. elegans development. ...

Molecular changes that underlie evolutionary changes in behavior and physiology are not well understood. Dauer formation in Caenorhabditis elegans is a temperature-sensitive process controlled through a network of signaling pathways associated with sensory neurons and is potentially an excellent system in which to investigate molecular changes in neuronal function during evolution. To begin to ...

A variety of bacterial infections cause muscle necrosis in humans. Caenorhabditis elegans has epidermis and bands of muscle that resemble soft-tissue structures in mammals and humans. Here, we developed a muscle necrosis model caused by Aeromonas dhakensis infection in C. elegans. Our data showed that A. dhakensis infected and killed C. elegans rapidly. Characteristic muscle damage in C. elegan...

The rising prevalence of methylmercury (MeHg) in seafood and in the global environment provides an impetus for delineating the mechanism of the toxicity of MeHg. Deleterious effects of MeHg have been widely observed in humans and in other mammals, the most striking of which occur in the nervous system. Here we test the model organism, Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), for MeHg toxicity. The ...

Over a century ago, the zoologist Emile Maupas first identified the nematode, Rhabditis elegans, in the soil in Algiers. Subsequent work and phylogenic studies renamed the species Caenorhabditis elegans or more commonly referred to as C. elegans; (Caeno meaning recent; rhabditis meaning rod; elegans meaning nice). However, it was not until 1963, when Sydney Brenner, already successful from his ...

BACKGROUND Dispersal is an important nematode behavior. Upon crowding or food depletion, the free living bacteriovorus nematode Caenorhabditis elegans produces stress resistant dispersal larvae, called dauer, which are analogous to second stage juveniles (J2) of plant parasitic Meloidogyne spp. and infective juveniles (IJ)s of entomopathogenic nematodes (EPN), e.g., Steinernema feltiae. Regulat...

BACKGROUND Aiweixin (AWX) is a traditional Uyghur medicine prescription, and has been mainly used to treat heart and brain diseases for a long time. Previous studies indicated that AWX had therapeutic effects in a rat model of myocardial ischemia reperfusion injury. In this study, we investigate whether AWX has protective effects against chromium toxicity in Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans)....

Random search is a behavioral strategy used by organisms from bacteria to humans to locate food that is randomly distributed and undetectable at a distance. We investigated this behavior in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, an organism with a small, well-described nervous system. Here we formulate a mathematical model of random search abstracted from the C. elegans connectome and fit to a la...

All eukaryotes so far studied, including animals, plants, yeasts and trypanosomes, have two pathways to target proteins to peroxisomes. These two pathways are specific for the two types of peroxisome targeting signal (PTS) present on peroxisomal matrix proteins. Remarkably, the complete genome sequence of Caenorhabditis elegans lacks the genes encoding proteins specific for the PTS2 targeting p...

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a popular model system in genetics, not least because a majority of human disease genes are conserved in C. elegans. To generate a comprehensive inventory of its expressed proteome, we performed extensive shotgun proteomics and identified more than half of all predicted C. elegans proteins. This allowed us to confirm and extend genome annotations, characte...