As promised, a thread explaining our newest BioRxiv paper, where we’ve discovered that C. elegans can transfer memories of pathogen avoidance to naïve individuals.

What if one worm could tell another that it has learned it is infected with a pathogen, and warn others? The idea of memory transfer has a checkered past, since the earliest reports of memory transfer in planaria.

We- @rebeccasmoore1 and Rachel Kaletsky, primarily- have been studying how C. elegans learns to avoid Pseudomonas after becoming sick. We previously found that they eat bacterial small RNAs, and one small RNA (P11) that is only around when the bacteria are pathogenic triggers...

...an avoidance response that happens not only in mothers, but is remembered by four generations of their progeny. We know that this process involves uptake and Dicer processing of small RNAs in the intestine, germline amplification, piRNAs,

and downregulation of a neuronal gene, maco-1, in the ASI neuron.