Worm Anchors

These glowing orbs are the embryos of a tiny nematode worm, known as C. elegans. Viewed down the microscope, they grow from a single fertilised egg cell (top left) into an organised structure made up of hundreds of cells (bottom right) after just eight hours. The glowing orange spots and streaks highlight sticky chemicals that act as biological anchors, responsible for attaching protein molecules to the surface of the embryo's cells and helping to hold them together. It's not just worms that have these tethers – many organisms from simple yeast to humans have them too. Faulty anchors are known to be responsible for a number of birth defects in children, causing problems with kidney and bowel development as well as mental retardation. By tracking the patterns of these molecular tethers in the worm embryos, scientists can start to pin down the underlying changes responsible for problems in developing humans.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image by Ronen Zaidel-Bar and colleagues
• National University of Singapore
• Originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Research published in PLOS Genetics, March 2015