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The roundworm Tokorhabditis tufae is an odd creature even among other nematodes. Nematodes live in every known ecosystem on Earth, from deserts to deep oceanic trenches to mountain lakes. And, in the case of T. tufae, even a lake with arsenic levels hundreds of times higher than the lethal level for humans. T. tufae also does something else very few nematodes can do: give birth to live young.

This 3D reconstruction of T. tufae, taken at the Imaging Innovation Lab at the MBL, shows the musculature of the worm (an adult female) as well as three developing worm babies. The image was taken on a custom stage-scanning line confocal microscope using an 100x/1.35 NA objective lens. The musculature is labeled with phalloidin.

MBL Whitman Fellow James Lee, Rockefeller University, is studying how these worms can survive such high doses of arsenic. He hopes to establish it as a new research organism for extremophile biology. By understanding how T. tufae is able to thrive in such an arsenic-rich environment, it may one day be possible to use the information to develop treatments for arsenic poisoning, which affects more than 230 million people around the world. 

Lee was a Kavli-Grass Fellow at the MBL in 2023, also studying T. tufae. Read more about that work.

About the Microscope

The stage-scanning line confocal was developed at the MBL. It is a novel microscope that is able to capture large fields of view at high resolution much faster than conventional, point-scanning confocal systems. It is also much "gentler" than a conventional confocal, meaning that the light that it uses to excite fluorescence in the specimen is less intense and thus less likely to cause photobleaching, or photodamage to live samples.

The stage-scanning line confocal possesses two identical light paths that make it compatible with a wide range of specimen types and enables simultaneous dual-view acquisition. It is ideally suited to image specimens that require the high magnification and resolution of confocal microscopy, but which are prohibitively large or sensitive for conventional point-scanning systems.