Caenorhabditis elegans

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Caenorhabditis elegans

• Quite a nifty lil worm.

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The Basics
C. elegans is a small worm one millimeter long.
There are two sexes, a male and a self
fertilizing hermaphrodite. Its inner workings are
similar to a humans, which is part of the reason
its considered a model organism.
Widely studied, C. elegans is a popular test
subject among neurology researchers and has had
many papers published on it in an array of of
topics. Currently there are 342 papers listed
under PubMed for C. elegans.
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Who sequenced it? The Sanger Institute and
Washington University. When? While
research on C. elegans began 1968 by Sydney
Brenner, its genome wasnt published until
1998 and not fully complete until 2002. Why?
Research began on C. elegans because of interest
its nervous and developmental systems, as they
are very similar to humans. It is still
being used in research for these same reasons.
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Because C. elegans is a eukaryote it contains a
nucleus. Within that nucleus are 6 chromosomes
that contain a total of 100,000,000 base pairs
with roughly 19,800 genes.
A related organism, C. briggsae, is in the
process of being sequenced. These two are often
compared to each other for reference.
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The End
And just for fun, go herehttp//www.bio.unc.edu/
faculty/goldstein/lab/crawl.mov Lookit that worm
crawl!