In the 1980s, John Sulston and co-workers identified the lineage of all 959 cells in the adult hermaphrodite, the first genes were cloned, and the physical map began to be constructed.
[3] Ellsworth Dougherty proposed in 1948 that free-living nematodes of the sub-order Rhabditina might be useful for genetic study, noting their relative structural simplicity and invariant cell lineage (eutely).
[6] By the early 1960s, Sydney Brenner had made several important contributions to molecular biology, notably a demonstration (with Francis Crick and other colleagues) that the genetic code is triplet in nature.
My ideas on this are still fluid and I cannot specify this in greater detail at the present time.By the end of that year, his thoughts were more concrete: Part of the success of molecular genetics was due to the use of extremely simple organisms which could be handled in large numbers...We should like to attack the problem of cellular development in a similar fashion, choosing the simplest possible differentiated organism and subjecting it to the analytical methods of microbial genetics...We think we have a good candidate in the form of a small nematode worm, Caenorhabditis briggsiae...To start with we propose to identify every cell in the worm and trace lineages.
[10] The most frequent method for generating transgenic worms is to inject exogenous DNA into the syncytial germ line; biolistic transformation can also be used.