Figure 1. The pharyngeal nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans.

(A) Overview of the C. elegans alimentary system from Wormbook (Hall and Altun, 2007), with neuronal cell bodies in the pharynx added in red. (B) Projection patterns of pharyngeal neurons within the pharynx displayed in the format of a subway map (kindly provided by SJ Cook). (C) Full connectome of pharyngeal nervous system, adapted from Cook et al., 2020. Square nodes are end organs, including muscle (green), marginal cells (fuchsia), gland cells (blue), epithelial cells (gray), and basement membrane (orange). Neurons are red ellipses. Neurons with outlines have either apical (purple), unexposed (brown), or embedded (blue) sensory endings. Directed chemical edges and undirected gap junction edges are represented by black arrows and red lines, respectively. The line width is proportional to the anatomical strength of that connection (# serial sections). The pharyngeal nervous system is connected to the rest of the nervous system through a single neuron pair (RIP). (D) Single cell transcriptome similarity between neuron types classes with widths of edges indicating strengths of similarity (Pearson correlation coefficients > 0.7), showing that pharyngeal neurons are more similar to each other than to other neurons in the C. elegans nervous system. Reproduced from Taylor et al., 2021. (E) Molecular markers used in this study for cell fate analysis. See Supplementary file 1 for information on reporter constructs.

© 2020, John Wily and Sons

Panel C is adapted from Cook et al., 2020 with permission from John Wily and Sons. It is not covered by the CC-BY 4.0 licence and further reproduction of this panel would need permission from the copyright holder.

© 2021, Elsevier

Panel D is reproduced from Figure 2i in Taylor et al., 2021 with permission from Elsevier. It is not covered by the CC-BY 4.0 licence and further reproduction of this panel would need permission from the copyright holder.