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Hershey heaven and Caenorhabditis elegans

Nature Genetics volume 21, pages 63–64 (1999)Cite this article

One of the founders of molecular biology, Al Hershey, proffered a vision of heaven, in which one would come into the lab every morning knowing what experiment to do, knowing that it was going to work and knowing that the result would be important. Whether the authors of the Caenorhabdiditis elegans genome project, published recently in Science1 felt they had ascended into heaven while performing this gigantic piece of work is unclear, but the project seems to fulfill Hershey's criteria. The investigators might point out that it was by no means certain that it would work completely, and indeed there is a negligible fraction of the genome (some small gaps of unknown length) that resisted all attempts at cloning, amplification and/or sequencing. Nevertheless, for the first time in history we have—for all practical purposes—a complete genome sequence of a multicellular organism. Because the two most interesting questions in biology are "How do we develop?" and "How do we think?", it is particularly gratifying to have to hand the identity of 97 million bases that encode a metazoan animal with a brain of 302 neurons.

The choice of C. elegans as the first animal genome to be sequenced was well considered: it is probably the animal that has been described in most detail—proportionately speaking—when it comes to phenotype2,3. The complete pattern of cell divisions that creates the 959 somatic cells in the adult animal has been determined and the wiring of its brain elucidated down to the level of individual synapses. There are numerous mutants with a wide range of phenotypes—from locomotion to sex determination, to early embryogenesis, to the periodicity of defecation.

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  1. Division of Molecular Biology, The Netherlands Cancer Institute, Plesmanlaan 121, Amsterdam, 1066CX, The Netherlands

    Ronald H.A. Plasterk

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  1. Ronald H.A. Plasterk
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Plasterk, R. Hershey heaven and Caenorhabditis elegans. Nat Genet 21, 63–64 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/4996

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