[
Development,
2019]
Transcriptional autoregulation occurs when transcription factors bind their own <i>cis</i>-regulatory sequences, ensuring their own continuous expression along with expression of other targets. During development, continued expression of identity-specifying transcription factors can be achieved by autoregulation, but until now formal evidence for a developmental requirement of autoregulation has been lacking. A new paper in Development provides this proof with the help of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing in the <i>C. elegans</i> nervous system<i>.</i> We caught up with the paper's two authors: postdoc Eduardo Leyva-Diaz and his supervisor Oliver Hobert, Professor of Biological Sciences and HHMI Investigator at Columbia University, New York, to find out more about the work.