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[
Nature,
1998]
In 1983, John Sulston and Alan Coulson began to construct a complete physical map of the genome of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, and started what became known as the C. elegans Genome Project. At the time, several people wondered why John, who had just described all of the cell divisions in C. elegans (the cell lineage), was interested in this project rather than in a more 'biological' problem. He replied by joking that he had a "weakness for grandiose, meaningless projects". In 1989, as the physical map approached completion, the Genome Project, now including Bob Waterston and his group, embarked on the even more ambitious goal of obtaining the complete genomic sequence
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[
Science,
1984]
In a dimly lit laboratory room in Gottingen, West Germany, Einhard Schierenberg bent his long, angular frame over his microscope, watching and counting, recording what he saw on charts and videotapes, hour upon hour, day after day, intermittently for six years. Five hundred miles away in a tiny, starkly equipped cubbyhole in Cambridge, England, John Sulston was doing the same thing, hunched over his microscope, earphones on his head to block any sound that might divert him from the image in his eyepiece. Sometimes he would sit watching all day long, diligently marking in a notebook with his colored pens. Schierenberg and Sulston were learning, cell by cell, how to build a worm.
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[
Science,
1996]
Geoffrey Gold, a physiologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, had wanted for years to put to rest a nagging question: How do odors trigger olfactory neurons to fire off action potentials to the brain? The dogma for the past 5 years had been that odors fall into two catagories, each of which acts via a different inracellular messenger molecule. But Gold believed this view was wrong, and that all odors work by increasing the production of the intracellular messenger cyclic AMP (cAMP). One day last spring, Gold got a phone call out of the blue from neurobiologist John Ngai, at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, offering the possibility of answering this question. It was my dream come true," says Gold. ......
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[
Science,
1996]
What 's the secret to long life? For the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, it's slow, easy living, in which all life's events occur in a leisurely rhythm, according to work described on page 1010 of this issue. The new research, by Siegfried Hekimi and Bernard Lakowski of McGill University in Montreal, identifies four genes that, when mutated, can make these worms use energy more efficiently, feed and swim at a slower pace-and live many times their normal life-span. Some of the experimental nematodes lived for almost 2 months, far longer than their expected 9 days.
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[
Science,
1996]
The one-cell animal embryo, or zygote, faces a daunting engineering task: implementing the architectural plans inscribed in its DNS for building a complex, multicelled body. So, like any sensible construction supervisor, the zygote swiftly divides the project into manageable chunks, assigning some of its progeny to build only gut, for example, and other to make only muscle or skin. Just how each early embryonic cell gets its orders is understood only for the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster-an achievement that helped win 1995's Nobel Prize in medicine for three developmental biologists. Now, however, the communication lines governing embryonic development are emerging in another animal beloved of developmental researchers: the tiny worm known as Caenorhabditis elegans.