Following the initial discovery of the homeobox in the 1980s in invertebrates and then vertebrates, it became quickly clear that homeobox genes come in two flavors – that of the Antennapedia-like HOX cluster genes and that of the many more non-clustered genes with diverse sequence and expression features (Gehring, 1998). One theme that became evident[…]

This interview, the 59th in our series, was recently published in Development The control of timing in development is crucial, both within and between tissues. Heterochrony involves shifts in the rate of development of some tissues relative to others, and although the first heterochronic genes were identified in Caenorhabditis elegans in the early 1980s, their role in inter-tissue developmental[…]

I recently attended the biennial Development, Cell Biology and Gene Expression C. elegans Meeting, this time in combination with the 2018 European Worm Meeting, in Barcelona. C. elegans meetings are always pretty special, defined more than anything else by the strong sense of community between researchers, or, as well like to call ourselves, ‘Worm People’.[…]

The key results of our recent paper in Nature Cell Biology   Cell polarization defines the spatial biological specificities in a cell. During the first cell cycle of a C. elegans zygote, its symmetry is broken by local remodeling of the cortical actomyosin network. This leads to a segregation of the dedicated polarity regulators, the PAR[…]

It’s all about the wires. But what about the glue? Networks make us who we are. I am not talking about social networks but about neural networks that define how we perceive the world and how we act. For a century, neuroscientists have sought to understand functions of neural networks in condition and how such[…]