In about a month, I will be educating kids about the link between genes and behavior at Science Saturday! I belong to a group of students and postdoctoral fellows that will construct booths to show kids that science is fun. And in the process, we will expose them to a multitude of scientific areas. This is an event put together by two science outreach groups at Rockefeller University and it's going to be amazing.
For my booth, I will present normal and abnormal strains of a small, transparent worm called Caenorhabditis elegans, or C. elegans. This worm is 1 millimeter in length and can be found in common outdoor areas such as compost heaps and garden soil. Due to its short generation time and relatively small genome, this worm has become popular for genetic studies mainly through the work of Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner.
By training I'm a developmental biologist, so visualizing the metamorphosis of a fertilized egg into a functional organism is quite breathtaking. Enjoy the video below of C. elegans development! How a fertilized egg develops into a hatching worm within twelve hours is nothing short of awesome!
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courtesy: Hymanlab
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