[
Discover,
1991]
Undulating under the microscope, its muscle and nerve cells visible within its transparent body, the tiny roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans is normally a creature of surprising grace. But one mutant strain is not elegans at all. It thrashes about in such an uncoordinated fashion that researchers have dubbed the mutant worm "unc"...
[
Nature,
1998]
In 1983, John Sulston and Alan Coulson began to construct a complete physical map of the genome of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, and started what became known as the C. elegans Genome Project. At the time, several people wondered why John, who had just described all of the cell divisions in C. elegans (the cell lineage), was interested in this project rather than in a more 'biological' problem. He replied by joking that he had a "weakness for grandiose, meaningless projects". In 1989, as the physical map approached completion, the Genome Project, now including Bob Waterston and his group, embarked on the even more ambitious goal of obtaining the complete genomic sequence
[
Nat Genet,
1992]
Predicting coding regions from genomic sequence is not entirely accurate, and predicting expression patterns of candidate genes is still a fantasy. Both of these concerns can be addressed by analysing expressed sequences (cDNA) in addition to genomic sequences. The genomic sequencing of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has begun; in parallel, several groups (including the genomic sequencing participants) are isolating, sequencing and mapping C. elegans cDNA clones. The first results of this endeavor, including the analysis of about 1,600 independent cDNA sequences, appear in this issue.