Mating strategies in Caenorhabditis elegans populations are determined by male developmental history
Rose S Al-Saadi, Jintao Luo, Alexandra M Nichitean, Nikolaus R Wagner, Nadia G Gaytan, Douglas S Portman, Sarah E Hall, L McIntyre · 2026
Read Mating strategies in Caenorhabditis elegans populations are determined by male developmental history by Rose S Al-Saadi, Jintao Luo, Alexandra M Nichitean, Nikolaus R Wagner, Nadia G Gaytan, Douglas S Portman, Sarah E Hall, L McIntyre (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13439940.txt.
Description
Al-Saadi and colleagues ask how early life shapes mating choices in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. Their 2026 paper looks at worms that passed through the dauer stage, a tough resting phase entered under stress. Earlier work showed such worms mate with partners more often instead of self-fertilizing. The team wanted to know which signals and genes carry that effect.
The authors ran mating tests with the standard N2 Bristol strain and with mutants in osm-9, daf-3, and mut-16. Males that had passed through dauer found mates better through scent chemicals than males that had not. The gene daf-3 mattered most in these males, while mut-16 mutants mated out less, and fixing them caused sterility across generations. The authors conclude that male history, acting through TGF-beta and RNAi pathways, sets the mating strategy.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Rose S Al-Saadi, Jintao Luo, Alexandra M Nichitean, Nikolaus R Wagner, Nadia G Gaytan, Douglas S Portman, Sarah E Hall, L McIntyre |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 67 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |