Enter your address to receive notifications about new posts to your email.
Articles tagged C. elegans
(37 results)
-
Undergraduate Travel Award winners — 22nd International C. elegans Conference
To promote excellence in undergraduate research and education, the Genetics Society of America has established a travel award to assist undergraduate members attending a GSA conference and presenting their research. We’re proud to announce the winners of the Undergraduate Travel Award! The recipients will be attending the 22nd International C. elegans Conference at UCLA from June 20–24, 2019. We can’t…
-
Building the basement
A suppressor screen in C. elegans uncovers previously unknown flexibility in the genetics underlying extracellular membranes. In nearly all animal tissues, thin barriers called basement membranes anchor outward-facing layers of cells—the linings of lungs, the top layers of skin, the insides of blood vessels—to the connective tissues that support them. Mutations disrupting any major basement…
-
ModERN treasure: hundreds of worm and fly transcription factor binding profiles cataloged
Offshoot of the modENCODE project provides crucial data and strains for understanding gene regulation. Following a multidisciplinary effort spanning six institutions, researchers working on the modERN (model organism Encyclopedia of Regulatory Networks) project have released a powerful resource for biologists studying the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. So far, report Kudron,…
-
Worm studies reveal cells on the move
Consider the papercut—a minor injury best known for the disproportionate amount of pain it can cause. That a wound so inconsequential can sting so terribly is curious, but perhaps even more surprising is the fact that it heals at all. To heal a wound, even one as trivial as a papercut, the cells involved in…
-
Hyper-conserved sperm proteins can still evolve rapidly
The fastest-evolving genes in eukaryotes commonly encode reproductive proteins—and the rate at which genes for male reproductive proteins change, in particular, often vastly outstrips the rate of change across the genome as a whole. A recent paper in G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics describes an unusual exception: the amino acid sequences of the most abundant sperm proteins in…
-
Genetics Society of America honors Barbara Meyer with 2018 Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal
The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is pleased to announce that Barbara Meyer is the recipient of the 2018 Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal, which is awarded for lifetime achievement in genetics. This honor is given in recognition of her groundbreaking work on chromosome behaviors that govern gene expression, development, and heredity. Meyer’s studies of how…
-
Circulomes vary based on cell type
In the 1980s, scientists first noticed circles of DNA interspersed among the normally linear chromosomes of eukaryotic nuclei. Little is known about these molecules, which are called extrachromosomal circular DNA (eccDNA). Variation in eccDNA appears to be biologically significant; development of an organism often comes with increased numbers of eccDNA, for example, and certain types…
-
Frontiers of Knowledge: An Interview with 2017 Edward Novitski Prize Recipient Jonathan Hodgkin
The Genetics Society of America’s Edward Novitski Prize recognizes a single experimental accomplishment or a body of work in which an exceptional level of creativity and intellectual ingenuity has been used to design and execute scientific experiments to solve a difficult problem in genetics. The 2017 winner, Jonathan Hodgkin, used elegant genetic studies to unravel…
-
Stressed-out worms hit the snooze button
When you catch a nasty cold, curling up in bed to sleep may be the only activity you can manage. Sleeping in response to stress isn’t a uniquely human behavior: many other animals have the same reaction, and it’s not clear why. While the circadian sleep that follows the pattern of the clock has been…
-
Why do so many Nobel Prizes go to scientists working on fruit flies?
As night fell, astronomer Jean Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan watched a plant’s leaves, symmetrically arranged side-by-side on a stem, clamp shut. It was 1729, and he was studying the dramatic nocturnal movement of Mimosa pudica. Strangely, he found that the plant behaved the same way even when it wasn’t exposed to natural cycles of light…
-
Germline immortality in C. elegans depends on epigenetic inheritance
Inheriting a trait from a grandparent doesn’t always involve their DNA sequences. In many organisms, some traits can be passed down for multiple generations via non-sequence based mechanisms, a phenomenon called transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. The most familiar example is that human disease risk might be influenced by the lifestyle of a person’s grandparents. But by…