Do we often think of worms? Wriggling away in our soil, eating detritus and pooping our nutrients for our gardens and food crops? Well, if you don’t you really should. Not only are they cute (at least I think they are), but they are a basic and profound part of recycling decaying matter into useful nutrients for our friends the plants. So here is something really cool about worms, Caenorhabditis elegans in particular. They actually have a genetic response to being well fed, changing their body’s metabolic response from merely maintaining, to growth. (unlike humans who just store food away as fat). They grow! Very handy since they spend a lot of their time in scarcity and don’t often get that opportunity. What does this mean for us? Well, now that we know a bit about this worm’s genetic response to being starved or well-fed, we can likely take that knowledge over to the parasitic worms that wreak havoc on human populations to help find a way to deter them from using us as a host.
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