Hermaphroditism has evolved several times independently in nematodes. The model organism Caenorhabditis elegans and Pristionchus pacificus are self-fertile hermaphrodites with rare facultative males. Both species are members of different families: C. elegans belongs to the Rhabditidae and P. pacificus to the Diplogastridae. Also, both species differ in their ecology: C. elegans is a soil-dwelli...

BACKGROUND To understand how alterations in the molecular mechanisms underlying developmental processes generate a diversity of biological forms, comparative developmental biology can be combined with genetic analysis. The formation of the nematode vulva is one tractable system for such evolutionary developmental analysis, as much is understood about its development in Caenorhabditis elegans. I...

A comparative study of several commonly-used killing, f i i g and mounting techniques was made to identify the optimum procedure for preparation of parthenogenetic adult female Caenorhabditis elegans for taxonomic examination. Nematodes were either 9 killed in hot water (95 OC) and fixed in cold fixative (22 "C) or iz) killed and fiied in hot fixative by Seinhorst's (1966) technique. Both the q...

In the subheading " Spe cies diagnosis and naming for 15 species of Caenorhabditis " of Nomen-clatural Acts, the following sentence was omitted from the paragraphs of description for all 15 species: " The type culture specimens are deposited at the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestrict...

The proteome of most parasite species is currently unknown. Hairworms (Nematomorpha), 300 species distributed around the world, are parasitic in arthropods (mainly terrestrial species) when juveniles, but they are free-living in aquatic environments when adult. Most aspects of their systematics and biology are currently unknown. The aim of this paper was (i) to report a novel and reproducible p...

The evolutionary pathway that has led to male tails of diverse morphology among species of the nematode family Rhabditidae was reconstructed. This family includes the well-studied model species Caenorhabditis elegans. By relating the steps of male tail morphological evolution to the phenotypic changes brought about by developmental mutations induced experimentally in C. elegans, the goal is to ...

Insect-parasitic nematodes, which obtain nutrients from a living host, arose independently in more than 20 lineages and in different geological periods since Silurian times. Except for Mermithidae, all these are Secernentea, which in various lineages exhibit different degrees between the first steps towards parasitism and obligate parasitism. Only in some tylenchids the transition passed throug...