A group of Forest Research and Development Organization Forest Research Institute, Miyazaki University School of Medicine, Tohoku University Graduate School of Life Sciences, and others have collaborated with overseas research institutes to produce Caenorhabditis inopinata, a sister species of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, which is a model organism. It was discovered from a species of Caenorhabditis on Ishigaki Island, and the entire genome was decoded.
C. elegans is a model organism that has been widely used in the fields of medicine and life science, and has led to various important discoveries such as those related to the research of the past three Nobel Prizes.However, the only weakness of this excellent model organism was the delay in evolutionary biological analysis due to the absence of "sister species".
This time, the research group discovered a long-sought sister species of C. elegans from fig fruits on Ishigaki Island, Okinawa Prefecture, and named it Caenorhabditis inopinata (C.inopinata).This is an extremely important finding to solve the "sister group absence problem" that has been a limiting factor in C. elegans research.This new nematode is more than twice as large as C. elegans and prefers figs and fig bees as habitats (C. elegans are free-living in a variety of environments). There is.This is a surprising difference for a sister group.The group also performed whole-genome decoding of C. inopinata and established genetic engineering technology.
With this result, C. inopinata will be widely used as a new model organism in the future, and by proceeding with research in combination with C. elegans, life phenomena will occur in various fields such as the mechanism of animal evolution and diversity. It is expected that the understanding of will be further deepened.
Paper information:[Nature Communications] Biology and genome of a newly discovered sibling species of Caenorhabditis elegans