C. elegans as a Disease Model: Molecular Perspectives: 2nd Edition
A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Pathology, Diagnostics, and Therapeutics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 September 2025 | Viewed by 1708
Special Issue Editor
Interests: developmental genetics; cell death; C. elegans; tumor genetics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been used for 50 years as a genetic model organism. “The worm” is one of the well-known non-mammalian model systems, having contributed to human disease gene discovery due to its ease-of-use and excellent genetic, genomic and cell biology tools.
As 40–60% of genes in C. elegans have orthologs or strong homologs in mammals and several biological mechanisms are conserved in both worms and mammals, the biological function of numerous disease-related genes has been revealed in this organism. Indeed, C. elegans has been used to investigate the genetic background of many biological processes, such as ageing or innate immunity.
In the era of genome editing, CRISPR can be used to mutate the worm homologs of disease-related genes, generating the mutation of interest. In addition, disease-related genes in C. elegans can be humanized by replacing the worm gene with its human ortholog, with the “humanized worm” able to be the target of further screens or assays.
C. elegans models have been successfully generated for several neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or Huntington’s disease. Currently, the nematode is also considered an emerging model for investigating different aspects of cancer.
Dr. Krisztina Takács-Vellai
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- Caenorhabditis elegans
- model organism
- disease model
- neurodegenerative diseases
- cancer model
- ageing
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