Some worms eat in company.
Fear, rather than fellow feeling, may drive them to dine together, research on new-found nervous system genes suggests. That a few genes can have such a profound effect on behaviour provided food for thought this week at the First Annual Symposium on Neurogenomics, held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. German and Australian strains bunch and eat together. A tiny change in one gene, encoding a cell receptor, transforms worms from loners to social animals, Cornelia Bargmann and her colleagues at the University of California in San Francisco told the conference's 500 delegates. Of the 73 gene differences, many work in synapses, the connections between nerve cells, Bargmann and her co-workers have found.