Thank you for checking out our “30 days of Science Education” series. Use Science Education videos to introduce undergraduates to the lab.
Caenorhabditis elegans, or roundworms, have revolutionized the way we approach genetic studies in understanding how genes regulate cellular activities. In this video, we review the characteristics of C. elegans that make it such a powerful model organism.
In this video-article,
researchers use a transgenic worm expressing human-associated genetic risk factors for Parkinson’s disease as a model to study neurodegeneration.
C. elegans, with their simple genetics and diminutive nervous systems, have helped us to understand numerous aspects of human development, behavior, aging and disease. Although, they do not have a brain per se, they have a rather sophisticated nervous system comprised of 302 neurons — almost a third of the total 959 cells found in an adult hermaphrodite C. elegans worm.
C. elegans are particularly well suited for studying the neurological diseases of aging such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS because of the fast life cycle and well defined nervous system of the animal.
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