Unlocking the "Chain of Worms" | Washington University in St. Louis

B. Duygu Özpolat and her team have published a cell atlas for the regenerative water nymph worm Pristina in Nature Communications. Özpolat began this work when she was a Hibbitt Fellow at the MBL and continued it after her move to Washington University in St. Louis. The project's gene expression microscopy studies started at MBL, and co-first author Helena García-Castro visited MBL for two months on a Company of Biologists travel fund.

An international team of scientists including B. Duygu Özpolat at Washington University in St. Louis has published the first single-cell atlas for Pristina leidyi (Pristina), the water nymph worm, a segmented annelid with extraordinary regenerative abilities that has fascinated biologists for more than a century.

Annelid worms — including the most familiar among them, the earthworms — are a broadly distributed, highly diverse, economically and environmentally important group of animals.

Most annelids can regenerate missing body parts, and many are able to reproduce asexually. But the adult stem cell populations involved in these processes, as well as the diversity of cell types generated by the stem cells, have remained unknown.

This particular worm, Pristina, first caught the eye of biologists in the 1800s and has remained an object of much interest.  Read rest of the article here.

Source: Unlocking the "Chain of Worms" | Washington University in St. Louis