Nematodes

To today's experimental biologists, the best known nematode is Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the major model organisms for genetic and biomedical research, the first metazoan with a sequenced genome and a key partner in the winning of three Nobel prizes - for the discoveries of programmed cell death and RNA interference, and for the development of green fluorescent protein (GFP) as a marker for gene expression. Approximately a thousand labs work on C. elegans worldwide; thus, this nematode is surely of great importance.