[
Genetics,
1996]
I fell in love with Caenorhabditis elegans in the summer of '72. Our relationship was cemented four years later, 20 years ago now, by the publication of a paper in Genetics on C. elegans chromosome rearrangements (Herman et al. 1976). My pleasant assignment here is to describe the beginning of that work and to relate it to current worm cytogenetics and chromosome mechanics.
[
Science,
2002]
The nematode worm known as Caenorhabditis elegans is not much to look at. Just a millimeter long and transparent to boot, it is almost invisible to the naked eye. But in biological research the tiny worm looms large, providing a model system for studying everything from embryonic development to aging. Now, three researchers who pioneered the use of C. elegans as a model organism have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
[
Genetics,
2002]
This article marks the 25th anniversary of a paper reporting the first sex-determination mutants to be found in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The isolation of these mutants initiated an extensive analysis of nematode sex determination and dosage compensation, carried out by a number of laboratories over the subsequent decades. As a result, the process of sex determination is now one of the most thoroughly understood parts of C. elegans development, in both genetic and molecular terms. It has also proved to have interesting repercussions on the study of sex determination in other organisms.