The genetics of wriggliness
March 8, 2011 in NEWS by Suzanne Elvidge
As well as having an excellent name, Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau, a French naturalist, classified worms as wrigglers and non-wrigglers, a categorization that has now been supported by genetics.
There are more than 15,000 species of Annelida (ringed worms), and these are split into two main groups, Clitellata (earthworms and leeches) and polychaetes (bristle worms) – these tie in with de Bréau’s classification of sedentary worms (non-wrigglers) and freely moving and active worms (wrigglers). However, there has been little research carried out on the evolution and evolutionary relationships of these organisms.
In a paper, published in Nature, researchers carried out phylogenomic analyses of 231 genes in 34 annelid taxa. This showed a genetic split early in the worms’ evolutionary history, into two clades – Errantia (errant or wriggling worms) and Sedentaria (sedentary or non-wriggling worms).
