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From: tbd@neuro (Tristan Davies)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: C. elegans
Message-ID: <22455@duke.cs.duke.edu>
Date: 27 Jun 91 15:49:57 GMT
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In article <51261@ut-emx.uucp> bill@dorrit.as.utexas.edu writes:
>I just wanted to alert people to an interesting
>article on C. elegans in the latest _Science_
>(v. 252, pp. 1619-20, 21 June 1991). Main points:
>
>  A group at Washington University is well along
>  in sequencing the entire genome (goal: done by
>  the year 2000). Some interesting surprises.
>  
>  The 302-neuron nervous system of this organism
>  shows some surprising capabilities to learn.
>
>  C. elegans may be useful in constructing useful
>  bioassays for toxicology, environmental
>  contaminants, and other purposes.
>
>Bill Jefferys

	Actually, the effort to understand C. elegans has been underway
since 1963, when Sydney Brenner (at the MRC in Cambridge, England) decided
that with  a small animal like C. elegans, it should be possible to unravel
the details of its existence.  One of the first areas to be expolored
was the nervous system, which was painstakingly reconstructed
in its entirety from serial electron microscopic sections (think
about how difficult that was!!).  The idea: if we can identify every
neuron and the connections it makes, we should be able to understand how
this nervous system guided the behavior of the animal, from input
to output.  So far, I'm not sure whether this has really happened. I
imagine that behaviors aren't quite so easy to understand.
	Another valuable area of research on the C. elegans nervous
system has been cell death.  As far as I can tell, it was in C. elegans
that researchers first realized that some cells are fated to die during
the natural course of development.
	I imagine that the C. elegans genome project will run into
some of the same problems as the above-mentioned nervous system
reconstructions; just because you have all the pieces doesn't mean you
can solve the puzzle.  This project's success should also be interesting
in rerlatiojn to the human genome project.  If sequencing C. elegans'
genome doesn`t lead to a complete understanding of that animal, how can
we expect the human genome project to be very useful for understanding
humans?

FYI, a lot of the facts in this post come from another interesting article:
"The Worm Project," Science vol. 248, p.1310, 15 June 1990.

By the way, has there been much discussion of the human Genome Project
in this group?  If not, how about starting one?

Happy trails!

Tristan "don't ask me. I'm just a worm" Davies


e-mail: tbd@neuro.duke.edu
Department of Neurobiology, Duke University Medical Center

grblb blabt unt mipt speeb!! oot piffoo blaboo..." -- Opus