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The worm's turn
The tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans, for short) shuns the limelight —— it's generally found feasting on rotting vegetation in soil —— but among biologists, it's something of a celebrity. It was the first multicellular organism to have its full set of genes, or genome, mapped. It is a favorite of molecular researchers because many of its approximately 20,000 genes have close counterparts in humans.
A celebrity among biologists, the worm C. elegans has had crucial parts of its genetic information decoded by DFCI researchers.
(Illustration by David Cutler)
For Marc Vidal, PhD, and his Dana-Farber colleagues, C. elegans is the organism of choice for tracking the interactions of proteins within cells. They and other researchers have identified more than 12,000 of the worm's "Open Reading Frames," or ORFs, the portions of its genes that contain the code for assembling proteins. Over the past four years, the Vidal lab has amassed a complete collection of those ORFs and has arranged to offer them through commercial distributors.
"It was clear from Day One that the ORF bank represented a larger resource than our lab could utilize fully," says David Hill, PhD, who co-directs the Dana-Farber program. "It made much more sense to make the ORFs generally available and give others the opportunity to find great ways of using this material. It's too valuable a resource to squirrel away."
He estimates that there have been 500 orders for ORFs from scientists worldwide since the collection became available in 2001. The materials have been employed in studies that run the gamut of molecular research: investigations of the roles of specific genes and proteins, of the function of key enzymes, of the "targets" that switch genes on or off, and more. For the next phase of the project, Vidal and his colleagues in Dana-Farber's Center for Cancer Systems Biology have generated a collection of more than 8,000 human ORFs, now available to scientists and soon to be increased by an additional 4,000 ORFs.
"C. elegans has been a great model for understanding biological activities that occur in a wide variety of organisms," Hill comments. "Being able to offer resources like this to others is almost as gratifying as making a discovery yourself."
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