Ellsworth C. Dougherty: A Pioneer in the Selection ofCaenorhabditis elegansas a Model Organism

Abstract

Ellsworth Dougherty was a man of impressive intellectual dimensions and interests; in a relatively short career he contributed enormously as researcher and scholar to the biological knowledge base for selection of Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism in neurobiology, genetics, and molecular biology. He helped guide the choice of strains that were eventually used, and, in particular, he developed the methodology and understanding for the nutrition and axenic culture of nematodes and other organisms. Dougherty insisted upon a concise terminology for culture techniques and coined descriptive neologisms that were justified by their linguistic roots. Among other contributions, he refined the classification system for the Protista.

NGT-3D: a simple nematode cultivation system to studyCaenorhabditiselegansbiology in 3D

“…The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been one of the most useful genetic model organisms in biology leading to several seminal discoveries. The wild-type C. elegans Bristol strain N2, originally obtained from a mushroom compost pile in England, has been cultivated in the laboratory for decades ( Ferris and Hieb, 2015 ), and maintained on the surface of a specialized agar called nematode growth media (NGM) that supports the growth of both nematode and its food, E. coli bacteria. Experiments on NGM have led to the discovery of a worm that displays complex and curious sensory behaviors along with memory that draws parallels with higher metazoans.…”

From “the Worm” to “the Worms” and Back Again: The Evolutionary Developmental Biology of Nematodes

“…One of the first experimental studies on C. elegans was performed by Japanese American Hikokuro Honda, who found that sperm determine the sex of progeny, and discovered that oocyte meiosis is not completed until after fertilization ( Honda 1925 ). Two decades later, the French biologist Victor Nigon and his American colleague Ellsworth Dougherty greatly extended this work ( Nigon 1943 ; Dougherty and Nigon 1949 ; Ferris and Hieb 2015 ; Nigon and Félix 2017 ), aided by improvements in culture methodology by Briggs (1946) . These workers set the stage for Sydney Brenner’s breakthroughs with C. elegans ( Brenner 1974 , 2009 ).…”

Biological Model : Caenorhabditis elegans

“…The early work of Doughtery and associates provided the concepts and methods of axenic and monoxenic cultures of C. elegans (Ferris and Hieb, 2015). The initiation of the research using C. elegans by Sidney Brenner in the 1960s resulted in a large number of worldwide research projects on this nematode.…”