Which worms are used for space research? │ Sending Worms to Space with Colleen Deane

Where are C. elegans from and what do they eat? In this next episode of our amazing new series Worms in Space for Health on Earth, we will tell you some of the cool facts about C. elegans.

So, now that you know C. elegans are a good model to study muscle decline during space flight and also during ageing, let’s tell you some more about the C. elegans worm.

C. elegans worm was originally found in a rubbish heap in Bristol, which is in the south-west of the United Kingdom. Now, these worms are super, super small, measuring about one millimetre in length when they are adults. So, we, as scientists, require microscopes so that we can visualise their anatomy.

Like humans, they are multicellular, meaning that they have many different cell types that make them up. They also tend to live in microbe-rich environments, such as the soil, and for food, they eat bacteria such as E. coli. Because of this, people wonder about whether C. elegans are dangerous to humans. But they are in fact non-hazardous, they are non-infectious, non-pathogenic, and also non-parasitic. So, basically, they’re not so bad.

C. elegans have two sexes: males and self-fertilising hermaphrodites, which means that they can produce their own offspring. Hermaphrodites make their sperm when they are in the larval stage, which means when they are a young worm, and they make the ova in the adult stage, so when they are the adult worms. What’s really incredible is that one hermaphrodite worm can produce 300 to 350 offspring, which means that we can grow plenty of C. elegans in the lab in absolutely no time.

When we grow C. elegans in the lab, we grow them on what’s called Petri dishes, which are roughly about the size of your palm, and on these Petri dishes, there can be up to 10 000 C. elegans. These Petri dishes contain agar, which is a jelly-like substance that allows them to move around on. And on this agar, we also put on their food, so they can move to their food so they don’t get hungry.

C. elegans also have a short lifespan, which is a really key reason for why they’re such a good model to study ageing. Typically, it takes 3 days for an egg to reach adulthood, and in total they only live for about 2 to 3 weeks, and this is when they’re kept at the normal temperature of about 20 degrees. If the C. elegans are kept at a lower temperature, such as 16 degrees, they grow slower and therefore live longer. And if they’re grown at a higher temperature, such as 25 degrees, they grow faster and therefore die sooner.

Amazingly, the whole genome of C. elegans is sequenced, meaning that we know all of the letters that make up the instructions which build the worm. This means that we can alter specific genes that we are interested in to generate mutant worms, which is critical in the study of gene function.

So, key questions are: how do C. elegans worms adapt to space flight, and why do we care? And what can these microscopic worms tell us about what happens to our bodies during space flight?

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