Nematode, an experimental animal in the national BioResource project.

The nematode C. elegans is a small and simple animal, which is easy to culture and store. Many detailed descriptions, biological resources, and methods for genetical and biochemical analyses have accumulated due to past research activities, and C. elegans is readily useful for molecular analyses with transgenic, RNAi, and mutants. Thus, C. elegans is an ideal model organism for detailed molecular analyses and functional genomics.