The nematode Pristionchus pacificus as a model system in evolutionary biology

All multicellular organisms in the animal kingdom share a surprisingly high number of molecular building blocks and many of the same regulatory pathways. Yet, we still do not know how the various organisms use and modify these pathways to generate the nearly endless diversity of biological form. Evolutionary developmental biology tackles this problem by comparing the development of one organism to another, related organism. We have established the nematode Pristionchus pacificus as a satellite organism in “evo-devo”. After the generation of a molecular toolkit, we now address multiple questions ranging from developmental biology, neurobiology and genomics all the way to ecology.