%0 Journal Article
%T The worm in the world and the world in the worm
%A Mark Blaxter
%A Dee R Denver
%J BMC Biology
%D 2012
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1741-7007-10-57
%X See research article http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/10/59 webciteCaenorhabditis elegans, the free-living nematode tamed as a new model organism by Sydney Brenner in the 1960s [1], has become a keystone species in the ecology of scientific knowledge. The ease with which C. elegans can be grown, manipulated and observed has driven biomedical research into new areas and 'the worm' has been a silent collaborator in three Nobel prizes, and thousands of research articles over the past 50 years. While primarily chosen because of the ease of genetic analysis, interest in C. elegans was redoubled when it became the first animal to have its whole genome sequenced [2]. The genome revealed much about the basic machinery of being an animal, and the specifics of being a nematode. One of the greatest surprises was the discovery of over 1,280 putative chemoreceptor genes [3]. This exuberant repertoire (even dogs have only approximately 1,200 olfactory and chemoreceptor genes) suggests that the nematodes' wild environment must be extraordinarily complex. However, the true ecology of C. elegans has remained enigmatic. In the laboratory it is clearly a boom-and-bust 'r-strategist' - a single self-fertilizing hermaphrodite (with an occasional rare male), given enough agar plates, Escherichia coli food and willing lab assistants, could produce over a billion great-granddaughters in a month. But where does it live, feed and reproduce in the wild? And how has its wild environment shaped the biology now explored in high-throughput investigations in labs worldwide? Marie-Anne F¨¦lix and Fabien Duveau report in BMC Biology [4] new findings from nematode populations in orchards near Paris that provide some answers to these questions.While often called a 'soil nematode', C. elegans has rarely been isolated from soils [5]. Sydney Brenner's C. elegans, the iconic N2 strain, came from mushroom compost in Bristol, UK. Like many related nematodes, C. elegans can enter a facultative diapause
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/10/57