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Updated: May 28, 2025

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Manipulation of Ploidy in Caenorhabditis elegans
Published on: March 15, 2018
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When one nucleus is not enough: Intestinal polyploidy fuels healthier progeny in C. elegans
1Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Center for Computational and Genomic Medicine, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
The Journal of Cell Biology
|February 11, 2025
Abstract:
In this issue, Lessenger and colleagues (https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.202403154) investigate why certain differentiated tissues require extremely high DNA content. Using the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, they show that restricting genome copies in intestinal cells triggers compensatory gene expression adaptations, which maintain organismal fitness at the expense of offspring vitality.

