the community site for and by developmental biologists
the community site for and by developmental biologists
Posted by Oliver Hobert on October 1st, 2020
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[…]
Posted by the Node Interviews on January 13th, 2020
This interview, the 73rd in our series, was recently published in Development. Animal cytokinesis is driven by an actomyosin ring that assembles at the cell equator and constricts to physically separate the two daughters. Although myosin is known to be essential for cytokinesis in multiple systems, whether this requirement reflects its motor or actin crosslinking activities has[…]
Posted by the Node Interviews on March 13th, 2019
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[…]
Posted by the Node Interviews on January 18th, 2019
This interview, the 55th in our series, was published in Development last year Sperm development and differentiation are regulated by somatic cells and the extracellular signals they produce – often regulators of proteolysis. Premature or delayed differentiation can compromise fertility, and thus tight spatiotemporal control of the process is crucial. A paper in Development addresses how two secreted proteins[…]
Posted by Sophie PR Gilbert on July 9th, 2018
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’.[…]
Posted by Sarah Hall on April 19th, 2018
Sarah E. Hall Department of Biology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244 For over a century, the nature versus nurture debate has questioned the relative contributions of genetic sequences and the environment to the phenotype of an individual (Galton 1869). Genome-wide association studies in humans have shown that environmental stress experienced in utero or during[…]
Posted by Shyi-Chyi on February 17th, 2018
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[…]
Posted by Ahmed Elewa on January 18th, 2018
The epic journey of embryogenesis begins with a set of maternal instructions. These instructions are in the form of transcribed mRNA, some even translated into proteins and ready for action. However, many of the critical maternal mRNAs are inactive and must be delivered to the right cell and activated at the right time to encode[…]
Posted by Georgia Rapti on October 20th, 2017
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[…]
Posted by the Node Interviews on September 29th, 2017
Cell polarisation is crucial for normal development and controlled by complex molecular interactions in the cytoplasm and at the membrane. Today we feature a paper recently published in Developmental Cell that describes a single-cell biochemistry technique and its insights into polarity protein dynamics the developing worm embryo. We caught up with first author Dan Dickinson, who carried out the work as a postdoc[…]
