Caenorhabditis elegans might not be an animal you’re particularly familiar with, but this humble little worm is one of the most important tools we have for studying metals in biological systems. These 1 mm long roundworms are self-fertilising, meaning you can raise literally millions of genetically identical offspring, and they were the first multi-cellular organism to have their entire genome mapped.
In a paper we’ve just published (coming from blog contributor Dr Gawain McColl) in Metallomics (grab it for free here), we partnered with researchers at the Australian Synchrotron’s X-ray Fluorescence Microscopy beamline and our new collaborator Dr Verena Wimmer, who runs the great Florey Advanced Microscopy Facility to look at how we can use a range of different techniques to examine metals in this worm at sub-micrometre levels.