Chronological History of C. elegans Contribution to Biomedical Research

1974

•    Syndney Brenner starts looking for a new model organism for geneticists to use as a research tool as an alternative to the fruit fly after geneticists find that the fruit fly has a very complex development making it difficult to study.

•    Brenner sees an opportunity in studying C.elegans due to the possibility of following C.elegans development and differentiation by tracing the cell lineage of every cell in this transparent organism. He writes an important articles on C. elegans entilted 'The Genetics of Caenorhabditis elegans'.

 1998

•    The C. elegans Sequencing Consortium publishes an essentially complete C. elegans genomic sequence in the December addition of the journal  'Science'.

•    This makes C. elegans the first multicellular organism to have its genome completely sequenced.
 

2002

•    Gaps which had been present in the 1998 C. elegans genome are filled in.

•    The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is given to Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John Sulston for 'their work on the genetics of organ development and programmed cell death' in C. elegans.

2003

•   The genome sequence of the C. elegans related nematode C. briggsae is determined which allows researchers to study genomic differences between these nematodes.

2006

•    The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to Andrew Fire and Craig C. Mello for their 'discovery of RNA interference' using C. elegans.

2008

•     Martin Chalfi is jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on 'the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein' which included work on C. Elegans.