This site contains bioinformatic tools created and developed in Ronen Zaidel Bar's Lab, for the benefit of the field of genetic research in Caenorhabditis elegans.
A prime use of this bioinformatic toolkit is to accelerate the study of human genetic variations that are known or suspected to cause disease by modeling them in C. elegans.
Although worms and humans differ greatly in their anatomy and physiology, at the cellular and molecular levels they are remarkably similar, and important genes often demonstrate a high degree of evolutionary conservation.
Therefore, the same mutation that causes a disease in humans might cause a problem in the development and/or life of a worm.
The tools on this website help to predict which C. elegans gene is the true ortholog of a given human gene (or vice versa), help determine whether a particular mutation is in a conserved amino acid, and help design the CRISPR-Cas9 strategy to mutate the worm genome in order to model the human variation.
