Apoptosis in C. elegans: lessons for cancer and immunity

INTRODUCTION Since 1974, when Sydney Brenner first introduced Caenorhabditis elegans in the scientific community as a model organism (Brenner, 1974), the nematode has been extensively used as a model system to study cellular biology. One of the most intriguing fields of molecular biology that have been investigated using this model host and that led to the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, is programmed cell death. Apoptosis is an evolutionarily conserved method employed by multicellular organisms to maintain tissue homeostasis during development and differentiation (Kuranaga, 2011), but can also serve as a way to prevent growth of cells mutated due to DNA damage (Bailly and Gartner, 2013).