Why are you working with Pristionchus pacificus and not with the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans?
We want to learn how development, i.e. the process during which a fertilized egg is tranformed into an adult organism, can be altered during the course of evolution. In C. elegans, many aspects of development are understood in detail at the cellular and the genetic level. However, C. elegans represents only one out of nearly 25.000 described nematode species, all of them with their own evolutionary history. By investigating P. pacificus development we want to contribute to a deeper understanding of how the diversity seen at the morphological level is linked to changes in developmental processes.
