Preface: Caenorhabditis elegans Postgenomic Era and the Biological Practice

C. elegans is entering the postgenomic era, which is expected to provide an unprecedented basis for a functional description of this simple model organism at the gene level. Reviews by G. Jansen on gene inactivation in C. elegans, F. Piano and K. Gunsalus on RNAibased functional genomics in C. elegans, JF. Rual et al. on the C. elegans interactome mapping project., V. Reinke on defining development through gene expression profiling, and E.M. Schwarz et al. on C. elegans databases (Current Genomics vol. 3, 2002) present detailed information suggesting that the horizontal integration of different genome-wide biological tags may profoundly impact on the practice of evolutionnary developmental biology research and biomedical research.