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From: cl@lgc.com (Cameron Laird)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: C. elegans
Message-ID: <1991Jun28.130653.9301@lgc.com>
Date: 28 Jun 91 13:06:53 GMT
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In article <22455@duke.cs.duke.edu> tbd@neuro.duke.edu (Tristan Davies) writes:
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>	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
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... and a big part of the idea was to undertake
this with an eye toward the developmental biology.
The C. elegans workers not only have elucidated
the wiring of the nervous system, but also how
that nervous system grows within the individual,
from its beginning as a single cell.  The molecular
biologists joined the party next, I think, so that
now there are intensive efforts on structure and
function at all (?) levels.
--

Cameron Laird				+1 713-579-4613
cl@lgc.com (cl%lgc.com@uunet.uu.net)	+1 713-996-8546