Welcome to our Website

Welcome to our Website on Caenorhabditis Elegans!

Caenorhabditis elegans, or just C. elegans, are a species of nematode that have been extensively studied as a model organism in molecular and developmental biology.

The species has a number of advantages in terms of biomedical research, which have been exploited to help create novel therapies to human diseases and to improve the scientific understanding of different molecular pathways.

This website explores the neural development of C. elegans and also provides information on a number of biomedical applications that research into the C. elegans nervous system and development has provided.

Development of the Nervous System in C. elegans

Brief Overview of C. elegan Development

In ideal conditions C. elegans go through four different larval stages during development, however if resources are scarce the juvenile C. elegans enter into a dauer state in which they become elongated and limit their consumption of resources. 

The life cycle of C. elegans and of all nematodes: 

 The C. elegans Mosaic Neural Development

• The C. elegans nervous system is built from a relatively invariant set of cell lineages. 

• This type of development, namely mosaic development, relies heavily on intrinsic cellular mechanisms and transcription factor cascades.

• The neuronal progenitor cells that produce the adult C. elegan neurons each differ by their position and also by their patterns of division.

• Each of the neuronal progenitor cells in a developing C. elegan gives rise to a set of mature adult C. elegan neurons that wouldn’t have developed had their neuronal progenitor cell been ablated early on in development.

• This suggests that neighbouring neuronal progenitor cells can’t fill in the neurons lost when a neuronal progenitor cell is ablated in vivo.  

 Useful Articles Discussing the Complexity of the Development of the C .elegan Nervous System 

    'A microRNA array reveals extensive regulation of microRNAs during brain development'

'Specification of the nervous system'

'Genetics and Neurobiology of C. elegans'

• Banner image courtesy of WormPress.com under the creative commons license.

• Life cycle image courtesy of Simon Fraser University under the creative commons license.                                                                                                                                                                           
•  Nervous System of a C. elegan image courtesy of WormAtlas under the creative commons license.