Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism is used as a human proxy for disease research, toxicity, behavioural studies, targeted drug discovery, and production of therapeutic peptides and vaccines.
To accelerate drug discovery, we use a technology that is based on the microscopic harmless worm as a research tool for rapid screening, identification, and characterization of bioactive components from biological sources simplifying the analysis of whether a drug of interest has potential therapeutic benefits or dangerous toxic side-effects.
published 05/09/2022
last updated 05/09/2022
Equipment and Materials in Brief
sterile petri plates, sterile test tubes, screw-cap bottles,
sterile Pasteur pipettes, pipettors,
autoclave, water bath, microwave oven,
standard dissecting stereo-microscopes,
temperature-controlled incubators, -80°C freezer,
flask shaker, vortex mixer, table-top centrifuge,
plate reader
C. elegans is a multicellular organism with nervous, muscle, digestive and reproductive systems, which are influenced by diet, nutrition and physical activity. It is a fast and affordable high-throughput platform for in vivo phenotypic assays that connect modified genes to animal behaviour, representing a human proxy for disease research to model neurological disorders, heart and kidney diseases, obesity, cancer, and ageing. The simplicity of the nervous and muscular design in the C. elegans, and the easy-to-manipulate metabolic system, combined with a good arsenal of molecular techniques, such as CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing, have now placed the goal of having animals that represent the individual human diseases for targeted drug treatment discovery within reach. Some of the C. elegans whole organism behavioural assays measured include toxicity, locomotion, egg-laying, defecation, chemotaxis, thermotaxis, touch-response, pharyngeal pumping, male mating, and dauer formation.