London - Scientists who took an almost invisible worm to pieces to unravel its DNA have finally completed the first ever genetic blueprint for a whole, many-celled animal.
It took 15 years and cost £30 million and, ironically, the recipe for the creature will never be printed. The worm may be tiny but its genetic code is 97 million letters long. The animal is a millimetresized nematode worm called Caernorhabditis elegans - C. elegans for short. It exists almost everywhere in the temperate world. C. elegans contains, according to the journal Science today, at least 19,099 genes, "written" in an alphabet composed of four DNA acids.
