ABOVE: C. elegans on a bed of bacteria are illuminated with a mixture of blue and amber light.
EUGENE L.Q. LEE
The tiny roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans is one of Earth’s most-studied creatures. Transparent and easily grown in the lab, it’s a favorite of geneticists and other researchers who experiment on it to derive broad lessons about animals’ inner workings. It can be frozen and then thawed back to life, and manipulated to model a panoply of human diseases. Its genome was first sequenced in 1998—five years before the same was completed for humans.
Yet C. elegans still harbors secrets, and a big one is unveiled today (March 4) in Science: this eyeless worm can, in a way, see, using color to help it discriminate between toxic and harmless bacteria when searching out food.
Researchers have previously shown that C. elegans can sense some types of light, notes study coauthor Dipon Ghosh, ...
