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Endogenous Rnai Pathways Are Required In Neurons For Dauer Formation In Caenorhabditis Elegans, Pallavi Bharadwaj

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Animals can adapt to unfavorable environments through changes in physiology and behavior. For Caenorhabditis elegans nematodes, environmental conditions perceived early in development determine whether the animal enters the reproductive cycle or enters into an alternative diapause stage called dauer. Here we demonstrate that endogenous RNA interference (endo-RNAi) pathways play a pivotal role early in the life cycle of worms in the detection of environmental conditions and mediating the appropriate developmental decisions. Our findings illustrate that functional endo-RNAi pathways contribute to the regulation of dauer formation in larvae when exposed to stress and recovery from the dauer stage when the conditions …