The worm in us – Caenorhabditis elegans as a model of human disease

In the post-genomic era, the identification and validation of potential human disease-causing or disease-associated genes are of major importance. Model organisms have an essential role in this process and might help to make these genes and their products amenable to pharmacological intervention. Usually, the activity of a candidate gene in the animal model is first eliminated by knockout techniques or reduced by mutations and the phenotypic consequences of the functional loss are monitored to analyze the role of the gene and its encoded protein. This strategy had been successfully applied to individual genes in the mouse and also in the much simpler fruitfly, Drosophila. However, genetic manipulations in these organisms are time-consuming and, owing to limitations in space, manpower and financial funding cannot be scaled up proportionally to analyse many genes at a time.