C. elegansWIKIMEDIA COMMONS, NATIONAL HUMAN GENOME RESEARCH INSTITUTE
Success often comes with its fair share of stress, and it’s no different for the model nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. A report published today (December 15) in Science Express reveals that worms that have a greater stress response are better at coping with deleterious mutations than their weakly-responding counterparts. But at a cost—these healthier, stress-responding worms are not as good at reproducing.
“We know that tradeoffs are important in evolution,” said Joanna Masel of the University of Arizona, who was not involved in the study, “but what this paper shows is that not only is there a tradeoff between stress response and having lots of babies, but that tradeoff can come down to a difference in just one, or a handful of factors.”
The factors ...
