Study Reveals Surprising Totipotency in Early Worm Embryos

Amber Rock (PhD candidate in The Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology at Harvard) and her advisor Professor Mansi Srivastava (MCZ Curator in Invertebrate Zoology) were able to isolate and rearrange the cells of early stage embryos and found that the cells showed extraordinary flexibility – in some cases single cells grew into a full-grown worm. The research goes against previous assumptions that because individual cells at this stage have different roles, removing or rearranging them would prevent growth of a complete organism.