Variation in the embryonic cell lineages of Caenorhabditis elegans natural populations

Cell-cycle timing in early embryos of Caenorhabditis elegans varies reproducibly among eight genetic backgrounds, with between-strain differences consistently larger than within-strain variation.

• Why it matters: Natural developmental diversity is hard to measure at single-cell lineage resolution across genotypes, limiting understanding of how evolution can generate phenotypic variation.
• What they did: Using embGAN for label-free lineage tracing, the study reconstructed early embryonic lineages of 78 embryos across eight genetic backgrounds and quantified cell-cycle timing with a lineage-aligned graph metric separating global tempo rescaling from localized lineage-structure changes.
• The result: The magnitude of timing variation is genotype-specific and not correlated with genetic divergence, and lineage patterning differences shift the timing of specific divisions in alignment with cell fate.

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