Scientists have long prized the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model for studying the biology of multicellular organisms. The millimeter-long worms are easy to grow in the lab and manipulate genetically, and they have only around 1,000 cells, making them a powerful system for probing intricacies of development, behavior and metabolism.

Now, a team at Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics (LSI) has produced new resources for C. elegans research: a comprehensive view of which genes are active in each of the four major tissues of adult worms, as well as a tool for predicting gene activity across 76 more specific cell types. The team was led by co-senior authors Coleen Murphy, professor of molecular biology and LSI, and Olga Troyanskaya, professor of computer science and LSI.