Abstract

From Sydney Brenner’s backyard to hundreds of labs across the globe, inspiring six Nobel Prize winners along the way, Caenorhabditis elegans research has come far in the past half century. The journey is not over. The virtues of C. elegans research are numerous and have been recounted extensively. Here, we focus on the remarkable progress made in sensory neurobiology research in C. elegans. This nematode continues to amaze researchers as we are still adding new discoveries to the already rich repertoire of sensory capabilities of this deceptively simple animal. Worms possess the sense of taste, smell, touch, light, temperature and proprioception, each of which is being studied in genetic, molecular, cellular and systems-level detail. This impressive organism can even detect less commonly recognized sensory cues such as magnetic fields and humidity.

 抽象的

从悉尼·布伦纳的后院到全球数百个实验室，秀丽隐杆线虫研究在过去的半个世纪中取得了长足的进步，一路上启发了六位诺贝尔奖获得者。旅程还没有结束。线虫研究的优点有很多，并且已经被广泛叙述。在这里，我们重点关注线虫感觉神经生物学研究取得的显着进展。这种线虫继续让研究人员感到惊讶，因为我们仍在为这种看似简单的动物已经丰富的感官能力添加新的发现。蠕虫拥有味觉、嗅觉、触觉、光感、温度感和本体感觉，每一种感觉都在遗传、分子、细胞和系统层面的细节上进行研究。这种令人印象深刻的生物体甚至可以检测不太常见的感官线索，例如磁场和湿度。