Why Caenorhabditis elegans?
- Multicellular organism with many tissues (e.g., intestine, muscle, gonads, nervous systems), but few cells (959 somatic cells)
- Physiological and molecular pathways are conserved with other animals including humans
- Tolerant of many environmental stressors
- Small and optically clear (ideal for in vivo imaging and fluorescent transgene tags)
- Well-defined and annotated genome with roughly the same number of genes as humans (~20,000)
- Simple and inexpensive methods for manipulating gene structure or expression
- Simple and inexpensive methods for transgenics
- Short lifespan making it a preeminent model for aging
- Inexpensive to culture (thousands can be grown on agar plates for less than a dollar)
- A model for nematodes (roundworms), which extensively burden human health and agriculture as parasites of plants, animals, and humans
- Comprehensive, user-friendly, and freely open database of all information on nematode biology, genetics, and molecular biology (ww.WormBase.org)