CHANGING STYLES IN C-ELEGANS GENETICS

The past 30 years have taken the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans from obscurity, as a nondescript member of a large but unglamorous inverteb rate phylum, to a position as one of the major model organisms. This y ear, it will acquire a particular celebrity as the owner of the first animal genome to be sequenced in its entirety. In this review we consi der the ways in which genetical investigations of this species have be gun to change and what some of the consequences of the completion of t he sequence are likely to be.