Caenorhabditis briggsae methods.

Caenorhabditis briggsae is being developed in parallel to C. elegans as a model system, primarily for the study of evolution. Like C. elegans , C. briggsae is a protandrous hermaphrodite and like C. elegans , its genome has been sequenced. From this point, these two model systems diverge. The development, behavior, and physiology of C. elegans have been characterized through tens of thousands of genetic and molecular studies. Genetic and molecular characterizations of C. briggsae are relatively few. Experimental resources in C. elegans include a high density recombination map that is well integrated with the genome sequence. The C. briggsae recombination map has yet to be published and attempts to integrate it with the genome sequence are in their infancy. Despite these deficiencies, C. briggsae is attractive for several reasons. First as a parallel system, it can be used to test the generality of results obtained in C. elegans . Second, it appears that the structure of the C. briggsae world-wide population is qualitatively different from that of C. elegans and that C. briggsae may be more amenable to studies of gene flow, genome evolution, and speciation. Finally, C. briggsae and C. remanei are sister species with C. elegans as an outgroup, making the C. briggsae–C. remanei species better for some aspects of comparative genomics.