“…The 1 mm long free-living soil nematode used in the animal model Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) established by Sydney Brenner in 1965 plays a key role in the decomposition and nutrient cycling (Sohlenius, 1980). The C. elegans in-vivo system has been used as a model for the assessment of toxic effects of air pollutants (Zhao et al, 2014;Sun et al, 2015Sun et al, , 2016Yang et al, 2016;Wu et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2018;Chung et al, 2019;Zhao et al, 2019) because it shows much advantages over other animal models: production of large number of progeny (100-200 from a single hermaphrodite), transparency, rapid life cycle (3 days), short lifespan (2-3 weeks), low cost, and easy laboratory cultivation (Brenner, 1974;Nass and Hamza, 2007). Moreover, C. elegans follows the widely accepted ethical principles, known as Three Rs (Reduction of the use of higher animals, Refinement of current techniques, and Replacement of animals with alternative methods) (Brenner, 1974).…”