Caenorhabditis elegans
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Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans [see el-eh-ganz] for short) is the name of an animal called a roundworm or nematode. C. elegans is about 1 mm long. The worms are not parasites. They live in soil and feed on bacteria. C. elegans is often a model organism, used to study animal development and behavior. It is the first multicellular organism for which scientists have been able to sequence its whole genome.
C. elegans has two types of sex: hermaphrodite and male. A hermaphrodite makes sperms when it's in a larval stage and makes eggs in an adult stage. A male can only make sperm. Males are a little smaller than hermaphrodites.
Study using C. elegans began in 1965 by Sydney Brenner. In laboratories, they are easy to keep alive. At 25ºC, they spend 14 hours as an embryo. Animals like C. elegans that don't take long to grow and are easy to feed are usually good organisms for research.
In 2002, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz, and John E. Sulston for their work on the how C. elegans's genes cause it to grow and cause some of its cells to die.
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