Spotlight on FMIers: Iskra Katic

At first glance, Caenorhabditis elegans , or C. elegans for short, isn't exactly awe-inspiring. This transparent roundworm, about 1 millimeter long, is essentially a set of liquid-filled tubes surrounded by a flexible exoskeleton; its huge gut starts at one end with a mouth, also known as the pharynx, and ends in the anus. As unremarkable as the worm may seem, in the past few decades it has contributed a great deal to medical science: seminal discoveries about programmed cell death, a process that is key for normal development but also plays an important role in cancer, were made using C. elegans and earned the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002. Iskra Katic, the head of the FMI C. elegans facility, tells us about her job and how this tiny worm can help researchers understand the building blocks of life. From your PhD to your current job, you've always worked with C. elegans . What do you like about this model organism? - My PhD program in the US had three rotations, and I initially thought I would want to join the mouse lab, but I liked the worm lab more — I just really liked the simplicity and the clarity of the system. Why is C. elegans a good model system for scientific research? - About 70% of worm genes are conserved to humans and the pattern of divisions from the fertilized egg to the adult, as well as the fates of individual cells, are completely elucidated.