In this composite image by Jeremy Vicencio and Nadia Halidi, we can see fluorescent-tagged nuclei in every cell of five different Caenorhabditis elegans worms captured in the Advanced Light Microscopy Unit at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG).
The image is part of a study done at Nick Stroustrup’s lab, where they looked into why some worms lived longer than others.
The researchers used their ‘Lifespan Machine’, a device which follows the entire lives of thousands of nematodes at once. The worms live in a petri dish housed inside the machine under a scanner that images them once per hour, gathering data about their behaviour.
They observed genetically identical worms in the same controlled environment (same diet, temperature, etc) and identified a group of at least 40 different genes that interact to make some individuals live longer than others – although the difference in lifespan seemed to be due to random differences in the activity of these genes.
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Matthias Eder, Olivier M.F. Martin, Natasha Oswal, Lucia Sedlackova, Cátia Moutinho, Andrea Del Carmen-Fabregat, Simon Menendez Bravo, Arnau Sebé-Pedrós, Holger Heyn, Nicholas Stroustrup. Systematic mapping of organism-scale gene-regulatory networks in aging using population asynchrony. Cell, 2024 Jul 25;187(15):3919-3935.e19.doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.05.050. Epub 2024 Jun 21
