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In response to nutrient limitation, many animals, including Caenorhabditis elegans, slow or arrest their development. This process requires mechanisms that sense essential nutrients and induce appropriate responses. When faced with nutrient limitation, C. elegans can induce both short and long‐term survival strategies, including larval arrest, decreased developmental rate, and dauer formation. To select the most advantageous strategy, information from many different sensors must be integrated into signaling pathways, including target of rapamycin (TOR) and insulin, that regulate developmental progression. Here, how nutrient information is sensed and integrated into developmental decisions that determine developmental rate and progression in C. elegans is reviewed.

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Reporting in Nature Cell Biology, Lin and Wang (2017) show that bacterial methyl metabolism impacts host mitochondrial dynamics and lipid storage in C. elegans. The authors propose a model whereby bacterial metabolic products regulate a nuclear hormone receptor that promotes lipid accumulation through expression of a secreted Hedgehog-like protein.