Wednesday, July 1st, 2020
Despite being such a tiny earth dweller, the roundworm species Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) has become one of the biggest workhorses in the lab for biological researchers. Due in part to the organism’s transparent skin and compact size — just about the size of a comma at 1 mm in length — it’s the only animal to have successfully had a complete mapping of its connectome, or its neural circuitry comprised of 302 neurons and their 7,000 synaptic connections.