Sex, bugs and Haldanes rule the nematode genus Pristionchus in the United States 英文参考文献.docVIP

Frontiers in Zoology BioMedCentral Research Open Access Sex, bugs and Haldanes rule: the nematode genus Pristionchus in the United States Matthias Herrmann, Werner E Mayer and Ralf J Sommer* Address: Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Department of Evolutionary Biology, Tübingen, Germany Email: Matthias Herrmann - matthias.herrmann@tuebingen.mpg.de; Werner E Mayer - werner.mayer@tuebingen.mpg.de; Ralf J Sommer* - ralf.sommer@tuebingen.mpg.de * Corresponding author Published: 12 September 2006 Received: 14 June 2006 Accepted: 12 September 2006 Frontiers in Zoology 2006, 3:14 doi:10.1186/1742-9994-3-14 This article is available from: /content/3/1/14 ? 2006 Herrmann et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: The nematode Pristionchus pacificus has been developed as a satellite organism in evolutionary developmental biology for comparison to Caenorhabditis elegans. Comparative studies have revealed major differences in the regulation of developmental processes between P. pacificus and C. elegans. To place evolutionary developmental biology and the observed developmental differences between species in a comprehensive evolutionary context, such studies have to be complemented with ecological aspects. Knowledge about the ecology of the organism in question might indicate specific environmental conditions that can result in developmental adaptations and could account for species differences in development. To this end, we have started to investigate the ecology of Pristionchus nematodes. In recent field studies in Western Europe we found six Pristionchus species that are closely associated with scarab beetles and the Colorado potato beetle. T