Nervous System

C. elegans is a 1 mm long round worm with 959 cells, 325 of which are neurons (Image by Bob Goldstein), making it an ideal model organism for studying the nervous system. The worm has been used in research that has led to two Nobel prizes: Craig Mello and Andrew Fire in 2006 (Fire, et al, 1998) for their work on RNA interference, and Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston in 2002 for their discovery of apoptosis genes.