The joy of figuring things out: a story of worms, haplotypes & genetic ancestry

The regenerative capacities of the hermaphroditic biotype of the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea allowed us to study Mendelian segregation and loss of heterozygosity in the genetically understudied Spiralian superclade in general, and flatworms in particular. We discovered that ~300 Mb (~37.5%) of the 800 Mb genome of the sexually reproducing S. mediterranea retains heterozygosity even after ten generations of inbreeding. Our research opens the door to study the evolutionary basis of non-Mendelian mechanisms and their potential relationship to the robust regenerative capacities of planarians.