Worm Descendants From Columbia Disaster Relaunched 80
astroengine writes "In 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia burned up on reentry, killing all seven astronauts on board. However, from the wreckage, a sample of C. elegans worms survived. On Monday, descendants from the worms that survived the disaster were launched on board Endeavour for experiments on the space station. 'C. elegans is a common, well-studied organism used in biomedical research as a model for human development, genetics, aging and disease,' says NASA. 'The organism shares many essential biological characteristics found in human biology.'"
Re:Worst post title ever. (Score:4, Informative)
Columbia is not a country.
Re:Dangerous (Score:5, Informative)
They have males and hermaphrodites. The males can fertilize the hermaphrodites, but the hermaphrodites can fertilize themselves as well. This is gross, and as a guy, kind of feels like nature telling me I'm non-essential.
In lab, the worms eat lawns of e.coli. They'll eat up all the bacteria on a petrie dish in a week. If you leave a plate of worms on ecoli and come back a month later, you'll see the worms have made balls of themselves, but are still alive. Worm biologists call that "dauer," and one was trying to explain something about it to me, but all I got out of it was the terrifying fact that even starvation can't kill them.
Holy water does not kill C. elegans. It just makes them sparkle.
Certain mutations cause the worms to be born without neurons. They survive, they're just "uncoordinated." Neurotoxin wouldn't be able to stop them either.
Certain other mutations cause the "bag of worms" phenotype. Remember how I said the hermaphrodites can fertilize themselves? If the worm can fertilize the eggs but not lay them... the embryos will eat their way out. It's like Aliens.
If you want a plate of worms all at the same age, you just soak them in bleach. One stage of development is evidently resistant. To bleach. Bleach even kills ebola. Not C. elegans.
Lastly, scientists have recently discovered that at night, the worms crawl into our eyes and control us like puppets, erasing nearly all evidence of it before dawn.
Re:Dangerous (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dangerous (Score:2, Informative)
"If you want a plate of worms all at the same age, you just soak them in bleach. One stage of development is evidently resistant. To bleach. Bleach even kills ebola. Not C. elegans. "
It's the eggs - they have an eggshell that's more resistant to bleach than the organism. If you let it sit in bleach for an hour it'll eat through the eggshell and kill the embryo, but there's a short period of time where the adult has dissolved but the eggshells are basically intact
"In lab, the worms eat lawns of e.coli. They'll eat up all the bacteria on a petrie dish in a week. If you leave a plate of worms on ecoli and come back a month later, you'll see the worms have made balls of themselves, but are still alive. Worm biologists call that "dauer," and one was trying to explain something about it to me, but all I got out of it was the terrifying fact that even starvation can't kill them."
This is actually two different phenotypes. Bags of worms are because the worm doesn't lay eggs if it's starving. The problem is that if they starve long enough, the eggs will hatch inside the mother, and... start crawling around and eating things. They can't get out because the worm has a strong skin, so until they're able to basically eat a hole out of the skin, they just crawl around inside
Dauer is a completely different and even more bizzare thing - the worm develops from an embryo to an adult in ~3 days normally, and then can survive as an adult for ~2-3 weeks. Without food, though, it halts mid-way in development as a "dauer", which can live for MONTHS with absolutely no food. Then if you give it food, it resumes development normally, becomes an adult, and has perfectly normal offspring