For Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Cori Bargmann, the worm's the thing. And not just because studying worms can tell us more about ourselves. Bargmann, who recently moved her lab from the University of California, San Francisco, to Rockefeller University, has taken to looking at problems from the worm's point of view. In addressing questions relating to nematode neurobiology and behavior, for example, "it helps to think about what the nervous system has evolved to do," she says. "What are the challenges the animal faces? What is the world it actually lives in?"
The approach has led to an appreciation of what it means to be a worm, and it has helped to explain some otherwise perplexing observations. Consider Caenorhabditis elegans' surprisingly sophisticated sense of smell. "Our own olfactory system has about 350 receptor genes," says Bargmann. Flies have maybe 150, mice around 1,000. "Worms have between 1,300 and 1,700 ...
