Guiding Guts

We start life as a single cell – a fertilised egg – that divides many times to make billions. These cells specialise and organise themselves to create the complex structures of a baby’s body as it grows in the womb. It’s difficult to study this incredible feat of biological engineering in human development, so researchers have turned to a simpler laboratory system: tiny nematode worms known as C. elegans. The tube that forms a worm’s gut is made from just 20 cells, which all originally come from a single progenitor. Using a high-powered microscope, scientists are able to watch the gut cells growing and organising themselves in real time (top), allowing them to recreate a computer model of the process (bottom). Each individual cell is highlighted in a different colour, revealing that just like the shifting blocks in a Rubik’s cube, the cells shuffle and switch around before finally ‘clicking’ into place.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

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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• Images from work by Alparsan Asan Stephan A. Raiders and James R. Priess
• Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, USA
• Images originally published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Genetics, April 2016