In December 2007, Marie-Anne Félix was taking a small cruise along the southwestern coast of India when she found herself docked in a remote lagoon in the backwaters of Kerala. Félix half recalls kingfishers foraging in the brackish waters around her, and pandanus shrubs creating a lush, green hue along the shore, but her gaze was mostly fixated on the brown, decaying matter on the ground.
"I had the whole boat crew looking at me, and there's a beautiful landscape, but I was more interested in rotting fruit," she says. "Usually, it requires a lot of explanation."
The explanation is that Félix, a developmental biologist at the Jacques Monod Institute in Paris, was hunting for microscopic nematode worms related to Caenorhabditis elegans.
C. elegans was the first organism to have its complete genome sequenced. But when it comes to finding functionally important genes or understanding greater evolutionary patterns, one genome ...
