Warwick L. Nicholas

Warwick Llewellyn Nicholas (1926–2010) was an Australian zoologist known as a pioneer in the field of nematology. He was a foundational member of the Australian Society for Parasitology (ASP) and in 1964, he organised the first ASP meeting. He became President of the Society in 1978,

Early life and education Warwick Nicholas was affectionately known by family, friends and colleagues as "Nick" or "Dr Nick" for most of his life (in later years expressing a preference to revert to Warwick). He was born in 1926 in Cheshire, a historic county in the north west of England. He lived his early childhood under the care of his mother and several relatives, and his father died when Nick was quite young of age. He was then awarded a Research Assistantship at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where he enrolled for a PhD. He was awarded the doctorate in 1953 for the specific work he did there on filariasis and the role of the biting midge Culicoides . Following this work in 1953, Nick won a Beit postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Liverpool In 1957 & 1958, Nick was a Travelling Fellow of the British Medical Research Council (MRC), funded by a Rockefeller grant (on leave from the University of Liverpool). During the tenure of his fellowship, he worked with Ellsworth C. Dougherty and Eder L. Hansen in the Lab of Comparative Biology at the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute in Richmond CA. Among other areas of research, an objective was to determine the nature of undefined factors of Rb and Cb required for axenic culture of Caenorhabditis briggsae. Rb and Cb factors were provided by bovine liver extract (among other sources). Rb and Cb became the initial letters of R. and later C. briggsae the authors described for the first time a fully defined medium (GS-25), which could sustain the development of C. elegans from larvae into adult, with just once the production of an F1 generation. It was found this medium with 1% of a protein fraction of bovine liver (LPF-C) could allow them to produce up to eight successive generations of C. elegans and proposal to the MRC,

Nicholas and Dougherty made several important findings while developing culturing techniques for strains of C. briggsae and C. elegans, which highly influenced Brenner's species and strain selection for genetic work. These included:

Ratio of female:male offspring It was also found the Bergerac strain of C. elegans could not be cultured above 18 °C. When it came time for this work to begin, Nicholas took L. N. Staniland's extraction of the Bristol strain of C. elegans (found in mushroom compost in England), produced the axenic culture of it, and brought it to Dougherty's lab.

Ongoing importance of C. elegans Over the decades since Nick's first axenic cultures of C. elegans, and Brenner's first demonstrations of it as a model organism for molecular and developmental biology, C. elegans has become one of the main model organisms in the field. Its significance is regarded on par with the species Drosophila melanogaster (vinegar fly) and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker's yeast).

Virtually all genetics conducted with C. elegans has been conducted using the Bristol strain, and more specifically the N2 line Brenner obtained and derived from Nicholas and Dougherty's culture.

Nobel prizes have been awarded in 2002 and 2006 for studies using N2 line, Bristol strain C. elegans as a model systemref name=":7" />

Career and research - in Australia (1960-onwards) Warwick Nicholas gathering nematodes in NSW south coast mud. Nicholas was an author of The Biology of Free-Living Nematodes (1975), published by Clarendon Press, Oxford. This remains a classic and important resource for those working on the ecology of nematodes. He described 35 new species and 5 new genera of nematodes. He was a founder of the Australian Society for Parasitology, and an editor of the Australasian Nematologists Newsletter.

Provided knowledge and skills, with collegial conduit Ellsworth C. Dougherty, on species C. elegans vitally important to Sydney Brenner's work. Brenner shared in a Nobel Prize in 2002 "for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death".