New opportunities at the wild frontier.

Jane Alfred,Ian T Baldwin

doi:10.7554/elife.06956

Abstract

A better understanding of the natural history of model organisms will increase their value as model systems and also keep them at the forefront of research.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06956.001

Highlights

A better understanding of the natural history of model organisms will increase their value as model systems and keep them at the forefront of research
Many of the fundamental principles of biology were discovered by developing a model organism to investigate a biological question
The principles of heredity, the genetic code, transcription, translation and DNA replication were a few of the landmark discoveries made in Drosophila melanogaster, the rock-star model insect, and Escherichia coli, the model bacterium

Summary

Introduction

Many of the fundamental principles of biology were discovered by developing a model organism to investigate a biological question. We know very little about the real lives of many model organisms, but it is clear that some of them are not very representative of their species To explore these questions further, eLife has invited a number of researchers to write about the natural histories of some of the bestestablished model organisms used in biological research, among them the zebrafish Danio rerio; the plants, maize and Arabidopsis thaliana; the nematode, Caenorhabitis elegans; and the microorganisms, Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. By providing a natural history context to these much loved, but decontextualized, research organisms, we hope that the articles in this series will help to heal the unhappy division of biology departments along cellular-molecular-developmental and ecological-evolutionary lines. We hope that these articles will prepare a more unified family of biologists to anticipate the research possibilities of a not-too-distant future, when the distinctions between model and nonmodel organisms become blurred

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