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Natural variation in the Caenorhabditis elegans egg-laying circuit modulates an intergenerational fitness trade-off.

Laure Mignerot | Clotilde Gimond | Lucie Bolelli | Charlotte Bouleau | Asma Sandjak | Thomas Boulin | Christian Braendle
eLife | 2024

Evolutionary transitions from egg laying (oviparity) to live birth (viviparity) are common across various taxa. Many species also exhibit genetic variation in egg-laying mode or display an intermediate mode with laid eggs containing embryos at various stages of development. Understanding the mechanistic basis and fitness consequences of such variation remains experimentally challenging. Here, we report highly variable intra-uterine egg retention across 316 Caenorhabditis elegans wild strains, some exhibiting strong retention, followed by internal hatching. We identify multiple evolutionary origins of such phenotypic extremes and pinpoint underlying candidate loci. Behavioral analysis and genetic manipulation indicates that this variation arises from genetic differences in the neuromodulatory architecture of the egg-laying circuitry. We provide experimental evidence that while strong egg retention can decrease maternal fitness due to in utero hatching, it may enhance offspring protection and confer a competitive advantage. Therefore, natural variation in C. elegans egg-laying behaviour can alter an apparent trade-off between different fitness components across generations. Our findings highlight underappreciated diversity in C. elegans egg-laying behavior and shed light on its fitness consequences. This behavioral variation offers a promising model to elucidate the molecular changes in a simple neural circuit underlying evolutionary shifts between alternative egg-laying modes in invertebrates.

Pubmed ID: 38564369

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Associated grants

  • Agency: Agence Nationale de la Recherche,
    Id: ANR-22-CE13-0030-02
  • Agency: Agence Nationale de la Recherche,
    Id: ANR-17-CE02-0017
  • Agency: Agence Nationale de la Recherche,
    Id: ANR-15-IDEX-01

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This is a list of tools and resources that we have found mentioned in this publication.


Fiji (tool)

RRID:SCR_002285

Software package as distribution of ImageJ and ImageJ2 together with Java, Java3D and plugins organized into coherent menu structure. Used to assist research in life sciences.

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WormBase (tool)

RRID:SCR_003098

Central data repository for nematode biology including complete genomic sequence, gene predictions and orthology assignments from range of related nematodes.Data concerning genetics, genomics and biology of C. elegans and related nematodes. Derived from initial ACeDB database of C. elegans genetic and sequence information, WormBase includes genomic, anatomical and functional information of C. elegans, other Caenorhabditis species and other nematodes. Maintains public FTP site where researchers can find many commonly requested files and datasets, WormBase software and prepackaged databases.

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Galaxy (tool)

RRID:SCR_006281

Open, web-based platform providing bioinformatics tools and services for data intensive genomic research. Platform may be used as a service or installed locally to perform, reproduce, and share complete analyses. Galaxy automatically tracks and manages data provenance and provides support for capturing the context and intent of computational methods. Galaxy Community has created Galaxy instances in many different forms and for many different applications including Galaxy servers, cloud services that support Galaxy instances, and virtual machines and containers that can be easily deployed for your own server.The Galaxy team is a part of BX at Penn State, and the Biology and Mathematics and Computer Science departments at Emory University.Training Infrastructure as a Service (TIaaS) is a service offered by some UseGalaxy servers to specifically support training use cases.

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