Analysing the genes of C. elegans has helped to show how this is done.
ECONOMIST: The first complete DNA sequence of an animal is now in the bag
Others wanted to focus on experimental animals, like the C. elegans worm or primates.
FORBES: Inside Paul Allen's Quest To Reverse Engineer The Brain
The C.elegans project was started in the 1970s by Dr Brenner, then at Cambridge University.
ECONOMIST: The 2002 Nobel prizes: Windows on the world | The
Bargmann of Rockefeller University studies a primitive worm, C. elegans, which has only 302 neurons in its brain.
Bacterial genomes are small fry compared with those of eukaryotes such as C. elegans: some 4m-5m bases long at most.
ECONOMIST: The first complete DNA sequence of an animal is now in the bag
Perhaps surprisingly, for what is on the face of things a simpler animal, C. elegans has a larger core proteome 9, 453 members.
Most of C. elegans's signalling proteins seem to have evolved this way although the origins of the adapted domains have sometimes proved surprising.
ECONOMIST: The first complete DNA sequence of an animal is now in the bag
Their immune systems, for example, while not as developed as those of vertebrates, seem to be more sophisticated than that of C. elegans.
While the mechanics of the Medea element are still not well understood, scientists have recently investigated another example in the nematode worm, C. elegans.
Cynthia Kenyon , a researcher at the University of California in San Francisco, found a life-extending gene in C. elegans, a tiny species of worm.
He tested his idea in a tiny nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans and, in 1994, published a paper showing how touch-receptor proteins are distributed around this worm.
This is a lengthy affair, which helps to explain why only two other eukaryotes (yeast, and a small worm called C. elegans) have had their genomes fully sequenced.
Over the course of 14 painstaking years the team managed to map the complete nervous system of C. elegans, work for which Dr Brenner, too, won a Nobel prize.
But Mello and Fire, working with worms called C. elegans, found that RNA could do a lot more than ferry notes from the DNA to the rest of the cell.
The researchers also are developing protein-network maps for other organisms, including a yeast cell and Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny worm with some 19, 000 genes, about the same number as humans.
In 1972 Sydney Brenner, a biologist then at Cambridge University, decided to work out the connections of every cell in the nervous system of a small nematode worm called C. elegans.
In C. elegans, this seems to have happened.
ECONOMIST: The first complete DNA sequence of an animal is now in the bag
One result of the study is to show that, even before the genetic engineers have got to work, around half of a fly's proteins are similar to those in mammals (for C. elegans the figure is a third).
In this case, the worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) was found by scientists at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US, to losing its muscle mass and strength as it aged, without any accompanying loss in nervous system function.
应用推荐