WHAT CONTROLS THE CHEMISTRY OF LIFE?
RNA REV
Biology is reeling from the discovery that tiny snippets of RNA—DNA’s
overlooked partner—regulate everything from longevity to cancer.
One of the great revolutions in modern science rests on the elongated backside of a grotesque, mutant worm. Inexpensive and easy to
manipulate in the lab, Caenorhabditis
elegans develops from egg to adult in
three days and produces a few hundred
offspring three days after that. Virtually all
of the worms are hermaphrodites, containing both male and female sex organs
and capable of making sperm and eggs,
so each creature can fertilize itself. And
because the worm is transparent and
the adult has only 959 cells, development of every stage from egg to adult
can be observed under the microscope
and documented with near perfect detail
while the worm is alive, an achievement
accomplished in the 1970s by Sidney
Brenner, a University of Cambridge
researcher and legend in the ;eld.
C. elegans has been a favorite in biology labs for years due to its transparency,
speedy reproductive cycle, and ability
to mutate on cue. Just irradiate it or add
chemical mutagens to its petri dish, then
wait a few days to see what kind of freak
worms appear in the progeny. In the late
1970s and 1980s, “worm talks” (as
C. elegans lectures were called) inevitably
began with a description of development in
the normal worm and segued to whatever
mutants the lecturer found intriguing.
The “bag of worms” was one such
mutant. This version of C. elegans has the
singular misfortune of being unable to lay
the eggs that it fertilizes. It gets stuck in the
earliest stage of wormy development, making the same larval cells repeatedly while
failing to form the organs and body parts
needed for later life—including the vulva
