Biologists turn against worm

From www.nature.com:

The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans has been one of the most important biological model systems for more than 30 years. But now growing numbers of researchers are abandoning the stalwart species to investigate closely related worms that offer better insights into the origins of complex biological traits.

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To tease apart this reproductive transition, Ronald Ellis, a developmental geneticist at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Stratford, and his colleagues turned their attention to C. remanei, a species that has only male and female sexes. Publishing today in Science1, Ellis's team showed that by lowering the expression of just two genes — one involved in the sex-determination pathway, the other in sperm activation — they could transform C. remanei females into sperm-producing, self-fertile hermaphrodites.

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