Related Research Articles
Caenorhabditis elegans is a free-living transparent nematode about 1 mm in length that lives in temperate soil environments. It is the type species of its genus. The name is a blend of the Greek caeno- (recent), rhabditis (rod-like) and Latin elegans (elegant). In 1900, Maupas initially named it Rhabditides elegans. Osche placed it in the subgenus Caenorhabditis in 1952, and in 1955, Dougherty raised Caenorhabditis to the status of genus.
Howard Robert Horvitz is an American biologist best known for his research on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, whose "seminal discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death" were "important for medical research and have shed new light on the pathogenesis of many diseases".
Sir John Edward Sulston was a British biologist and academic who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the cell lineage and genome of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans in 2002 with his colleagues Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz. He was a leader in human genome research and Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester. Sulston was in favour of science in the public interest, such as free public access of scientific information and against the patenting of genes and the privatisation of genetic technologies.
Root-knot nematodes are plant-parasitic nematodes from the genus Meloidogyne. They exist in soil in areas with hot climates or short winters. About 2000 plants worldwide are susceptible to infection by root-knot nematodes and they cause approximately 5% of global crop loss. Root-knot nematode larvae infect plant roots, causing the development of root-knot galls that drain the plant's photosynthate and nutrients. Infection of young plants may be lethal, while infection of mature plants causes decreased yield.
Dauer describes an alternative developmental stage of nematode worms, particularly rhabditids including Caenorhabditis elegans, whereby the larva goes into a type of stasis and can survive harsh conditions. Since the decision to enter the dauer stage is dependent on environmental cues, it represents a classic and well studied example of polyphenism. The dauer state is given other names in the various types of nematodes such as ‘diapause’ or ‘hypobiosis’, but since the C. elegans nematode has become the most studied nematode, the term ‘dauer stage’ or 'dauer larvae' is becoming universally recognised when referring to this state in other free-living nematodes. The dauer stage is also considered to be equivalent to the infective stage of parasitic nematode larvae.
Major sperm protein (MSP) is a nematode specific small protein of 126 amino acids with a molecular weight of 14 kDa. It is the key player in the motility machinery of nematodes that propels the crawling movement/motility of nematode sperm. It is the most abundant protein present in nematode sperm, comprising 15% of the total protein and more than 40% of the soluble protein. MSP is exclusively synthesized in spermatocytes of the nematodes. The MSP has two main functions in the reproduction of the helminthes: i) as cytosolic component it is responsible for the crawling movement of the mature sperm, and ii) once released, it acts as hormone on the female germ cells, where it triggers oocyte maturation and stimulates the oviduct wall to contract to bring the oocytes into position for fertilization. MSP has first been identified in Caenorhabditis elegans.
Caenorhabditis briggsae is a small nematode, closely related to Caenorhabditis elegans. The differences between the two species are subtle. The male tail in C. briggsae has a slightly different morphology from C. elegans. Other differences include changes in vulval precursor competence and the placement of the excretory duct opening. C. briggsae is frequently used to study the differences between it and the more intimately understood C. elegans, especially at the DNA and protein sequence level. Several mutant strains of C. briggsae have also been isolated that facilitate genetic analysis of this organism. C. briggsae, like C. elegans, is a hermaphrodite. The genome sequence for C. briggsae was determined in 2003.
John Graham White is a Professor Emeritus of Anatomy and Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
In molecular biology lin-4 is a microRNA (miRNA) that was identified from a study of developmental timing in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. It was the first to be discovered of the miRNAs, a class of non-coding RNAs involved in gene regulation. miRNAs are transcribed as ~70 nucleotide precursors and subsequently processed by the Dicer enzyme to give a 21 nucleotide product. The extents of the hairpin precursors are not generally known and are estimated based on hairpin prediction. The products are thought to have regulatory roles through complete or partial complementarity to mRNA. The lin-4 gene has been found to lie within a 4.11kb intron of a separate host gene.
Most animal testing involves invertebrates, especially Drosophila melanogaster, a fruit fly, and Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode. These animals offer scientists many advantages over vertebrates, including their short life cycle, simple anatomy and the ease with which large numbers of individuals may be studied. Invertebrates are often cost-effective, as thousands of flies or nematodes can be housed in a single room.
The alae is a protruding ridge that forms longitudinally on many nematodes. In the Caenorhabditis elegans nematode they are present in the L1, dauer and adult stages. The alae are most pronounced during the dauer larval stage and not present in the L2, and L3 C. elegans stages.
The nematodes or roundworms constitute the phylum Nematoda, with plant-parasitic nematodes being known as eelworms. They are a diverse animal phylum inhabiting a broad range of environments. Taxonomically, they are classified along with insects and other moulting animals in the clade Ecdysozoa, and unlike flatworms, have tubular digestive systems with openings at both ends. Like tardigrades they have a reduced number of Hox genes, but as their sister phylum Nematomorpha has kept the ancestral protostome Hox genotype, it shows that the reduction has occurred within the nematode phylum.
SmY ribonucleic acids are a family of small nuclear RNAs found in some species of nematode worms. They are thought to be involved in mRNA trans-splicing.
Jonathan Alan Hodgkin is a British biochemist, Professor of Genetics at the University of Oxford, and an emeritus fellow of Keble College, Oxford.
OpenWorm is an international open science project to simulate the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans at the cellular level as a simulation. Although the long-term goal is to model all 959 cells of the C. elegans, the first stage is to model the worm's locomotion by simulating the 302 neurons and 95 muscle cells. This bottom up simulation is being pursued by the OpenWorm community. As of this writing, a physics engine called Sibernetic has been built for the project and models of the neural connectome and a muscle cell have been created in NeuroML format. A 3D model of the worm anatomy can be accessed through the web via the OpenWorm browser. The OpenWorm project is also contributing to develop Geppetto, a web-based multi-algorithm, multi-scale simulation platform engineered to support the simulation of the whole organism.
WormBase is an online biological database about the biology and genome of the nematode model organism Caenorhabditis elegans and contains information about other related nematodes. WormBase is used by the C. elegans research community both as an information resource and as a place to publish and distribute their results. The database is regularly updated with new versions being released every two months. WormBase is one of the organizations participating in the Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD) project.
Caenorhabditis elegans- microbe interactions are defined as any interaction that encompasses the association with microbes that temporarily or permanently live in or on the nematode C. elegans. The microbes can engage in a commensal, mutualistic or pathogenic interaction with the host. These include bacterial, viral, unicellular eukaryotic, and fungal interactions. In nature C. elegans harbours a variety of different microbes. In contrast, C. elegans strains that are cultivated in laboratories for research purposes have lost the natural associated microbial communities and are commonly maintained on a single bacterial strain, Escherichia coli OP50. However, E. coli OP50 does not allow for reverse genetic screens because RNAi libraries have only been generated in strain HT115. This limits the ability to study bacterial effects on host phenotypes. The host microbe interactions of C. elegans are closely studied because of their orthologs in humans. Therefore, the better we understand the host interactions of C. elegans the better we can understand the host interactions within the human body.
Crassolabium is a genus of nematodes in the family Qudsianematidae.
Victor Marc Nigon was a biologist who was first to study the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans in the laboratory, with Ellsworth Dougherty, in the 1940s.
References
- ↑ Nematodes of the Northern Great Plains Part II. G Thorne, 1974
