Amazing stuff!
"For decades, scientists with big questions about biology have found answers in a tiny worm. That worm — a millimeter-long creature called Caenorhabditis elegans — has helped researchers uncover fundamental features of how cells and organisms work. The impact of that work is enormous: Discoveries made using C. elegans have been recognized with four Nobel Prizes and have led to the development of new treatments for human disease. ..."
From the abstract:
"Experimental organisms such as the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans are fundamental to biological discovery. The success of C. elegans research has been greatly enabled by infrastructure that allows thousands of scientists to share and access research materials and unpublished information efficiently.
Here, we celebrate the worm by interweaving vignettes describing four Nobel Prize–winning discoveries with descriptions of how the major NIH-supported research resources—the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center, WormBase, and WormAtlas—provide invaluable support for all C. elegans research. The synergy between investigation and the availability of shared resources for the C. elegans community is a paradigm for all model organism research, and the continued support of such community research resources will be essential for maximizing impactful discoveries in the future."
From nematode to Nobel: How community-shared resources fueled the rise of Caenorhabditis elegans as a research organism (open access)
A C. elegans adult next to two developing embryos,
Syndey Brenner, and
graph showing striking growth in the number of PubMed-indexed publications with key word “C. elegans.”
Fig. 2 A conserved pathway for programmed cell death occurs in four steps: identify the victim, make the kill, get rid of the body, and destroy the evidence.
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