Nature's Gift to Neuroscience: A Tribute to Sydney Brenner and John Sulston

In the 1960s, Sydney Brenner proposed to use the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans to discover the control mechanisms of animal development and to reveal how a small number of neurons generate different behaviours, giving birth to a vibrant community that uses this animal model for their studies. Brenner was aided in his aim by John Sulston, who mapped the C. elegans cell lineages – from a single cell to the multicellular adult – which transformed the field of developmental biology.

As a...