This Cornell Research story focuses on the work of Jun "Kelly" Liu, professor of molecular biology and genetics, whose lab uses c. elegans nematodes to explore questions that improve the general understanding of developmental processes, stem cell biology and cellular reprogramming, and fundamental mechanisms involved in cell-cell signaling.
"An adult C. elegans hermaphrodite has a fixed number of somatic (nonreproductive) cells—exactly 959,” Liu says in the story. “It’s one of the best organisms to study molecular mechanisms controlling development at single cell resolution, because it’s transparent, and we know the entire lineage history of those 959 cells, starting from the single, fertilized egg.”
