Word: roundworm
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Twenty years ago, Ruvkun and Ambros, then fellows working in the laboratory of MIT professor H. Robert Horvitz, began studying the genes that control the development of the Caenorhabditis elegans, a 1 mm-long roundworm that biologists often use as a model organism, from newly-hatched larva to fully-grown adult...
...must have about 100,000 genes stitched onto our 23 pairs of chromosomes, only to discover that the number is less than a third of that. Like a vaccine against pride, the sublime achievement of the human intellect reveals that we have only twice as many genes as a roundworm, about three times as many as a fruit fly, only six times as many as bakers' yeast. Some of those genes trace back to a time when we were fish; more than 200 come directly from bacteria. Our DNA provides a history book of where we come from...
...also was the first to use the roundworm C. elegans to analyze complex biological processes. His more recent research has focused on cloning techniques and vertebrate genomics...
Ruvkun and other scientists choose to work with the laboratory roundworm, a tiny bacteria-eating soil-dweller, because the sequence of its entire genome is known and its 302-neuron nervous system has been described in detail...
...careful about generalizing extensively from observations in the roundworm," said Dr. Richard Weindruch, who studies aging in mice at the University of Wisconsin. "It's not clear to what extent these findings represent the situation in mammals...