Dec. 11, 1998:
C. elegans: Sequence to Biology
-Jonathan Hodgkin, H. Robert Horvitz, Barbara
R. Jasny, Judith Kimble*
This special issue of Science
celebrates a landmark in biology: determination of
the essentially complete DNA
sequence of an animal genome. The animal is a small
invertebrate, the nematode (or
roundworm) Caenorhabditis elegans, and the
sequence consists of about 97
million base pairs of DNA, approximately
one-thirtieth the number in the
human genome. Nonetheless, the information content
is enormous--eight times that of
the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the only other eukaryote with a sequenced genome.