History of major events involving C.elegans in Biomedical research

1974

•    Syndney Brenner starts using C.elegans as a model organism after geneticists find that the fruit fly has a very complex development making it difficult to study.

•    Brenner saw an opportunity in choosing to study C.elegans as a geneticist, due to the possibility of following C.elegans development and differentiation by tracing the lineage of every cell in this transparent organism.

 1998

•    The C. elegans Sequencing Consortium announces the essentially complete C. elegans genomic sequence in the December addition of science

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

2002

•    Filling in of the gaps present in the 1998  C. elegan genomic sequence is completed by October

•    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. elegan related nematode C. briggsae is determined which allows researchers to study the genomic differences among 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 shares the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on 'the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein' which included work on C. Elegans