Juxtaposing Caenorhabditis elegans-Pathogenic Mould Model with Other Models; How Reliable Is This Nematode Model? A Mini Review

The application of Caenorhabditis elegans as a pathogenic model has spanned decades. Its use for pathogenic mould modeling has been attracting some attention lately, though not without some reservations. Several studies have shown C. elegans to be a reliable model for evaluating moulds’ virulence factors and patterns as well as for screening the pathogenicity of mutant strains alongside their parental/wild type and revertant/complementary strains. There is a very high degree of reported similarities between the virulence patterns demonstrated in C. elegans and those of other invertebrate and vertebrate models. We have here presented several works in which this nematode model was adopted for virulence evaluation, and other comparative research in which virulence in C. elegans model were juxtaposed with other models. We have further presented possible reasons why there might have been variations of virulence in a few cases, thereby validating C. elegans to be an effective and reliable tool in the study of pathogenic moulds.