How are humans like worms? │ Sending Worms to Space with Colleen Deane
In what way are humans and worms alike?
At first, you might think we have nothing in common with worms.
But meet C. elegans, a worm with human-like muscles, genes and nervous system - and find out how studying this creature in space is advancing research in human health on Earth.
Find out more:
https://sshs.exeter.ac.uk/staff/profi...
Worms in Space Twitter account - https://twitter.com/worms_space
Worms in Space website - https://www.mme-spaceworms.com
Spaceflight experiment using Caenorhabditis elegans aboard the Japanese Experiment Module of the International Space Station - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28725...
This series was produced with our partner Pint of Science! Find out more: www.pintofscience.com
Why are worms used for space research? And can they help us understand health on Earth? The big question is, are worms similar to humans and how can research on worms in space be translated to improving human health on Earth?
In this next episode of our amazing new series, we meet C. elegans, a worm with human-like muscles, guts and nervous system that is helping us advance research into humans and medicine.
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Well, there are over 1 million types of worm, but there is only one worm that is commonly used across the world by scientists for research. And this worm is called C. elegans. Now, C. elegans are microscopic, meaning that scientists can keep thousands of them in the lab at a time. And because of this they are cheap and they are very easy for us to maintain, and that makes them perfect for research and particularly for space flight research. Now, at first, you might think that there are no similarities between worms and people since worms are tiny in comparison to us as humans and we look quite different.
However, there are many, many common features between us and the worm. For example, C. elegans have muscles, a gut, nerves, a circulatory system, and in order to move around, C. elegans convert food into energy just like humans. Also, 80% of the instructions used to build a worm, known as our genes, are similar to humans, and that makes them an ideal model for studying human ageing and disease. In fact, C. elegans is such a good model that using them in research has led to huge scientific discoveries in medicine.
For example, researchers use C. elegans to try and understand how reproductive organs are made, and in doing so, they found out a critical process called programmed cell death. This is now recognised as a critical process not only in the worms but also in humans. And if this process didn't happen, the skin between our fingers would fuse, meaning our hands would become webbed.
Importantly, because worms have many similarities to humans, we can apply what we learn about our muscles from these tiny worms in space to improve our muscle health on Earth. Now, this is particularly relevant to ageing on Earth, because as we get older, our muscles, they get weaker and they get smaller.
What else do we know about C. elegans? For example, what do they eat? How do they have babies? And how long does a C. elegans live?
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