Model organism

The concept of model species or model organism refers to biological species used in biomedical research to exemplarily elucidate biological processes, especially at the molecular and cellular levels. It is widely studied, usually since it is easy to maintain and breed in a laboratory setting and has particular experimental advantages. They often have smaller genomes compared to their close relatives and recently many of them have been sequenced by genome projects. Some examples of model species include the bacterium Escherichia coli, the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the mouse Mus musculus, the zebra fish Danio rerio and the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana.