| C. elegans is a small, free-living soil nematode that feeds primarily on bacteria. Its usefulness as a model organism is a result of its genetic tractability, rapid generation time, ease of propagation, a well-defined cell lineage map, and a fully sequenced genome that contains a large number of vertebrate orthologues. Because C. elegans is genetically tractable, it has been used to study a variety of biological processes including, for example, ageing, apoptosis, chemosensation, and more recently bacterial pathogenesis and innate immunity. |
