Jeremy Nance: Charting gastrulation’s gyrations

As the son of a chemistry professor and a mom who sent him to bird-watching camp to " get me out of the house, " Jeremy Nance naturally gravitated toward biology. But it wasn't until graduate school at the University of Arizona that Nance discovered his penchant for developmental biology and an admiration for the C. elegans nematode, which develops from one cell to 550 in the space of 12 hours. One of the earliest steps of embryogen-esis is gastrulation, in which the embryo reorganizes itself into three cell layers. An unlikely parade performance inspired him to study this process in C. elegans as a postdoc with James Priess at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. In 2004, Nance set up his own group at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at New York University School of Medicine to continue investigating gastrulation's regulation and the cell polarization events that set gas-trulation up for success (1). Since then, Nance's group has identified a RhoGAP called PAC-1 that is responsible for establishing radial cell polarity in the earliest stages of embryogenesis (2). They also discovered two key roles for E-cadherin in early development: an active role in defi ning the cell–cell contacts that cue up polarity (3) and providing the glue that lets primordial germ cells hitch a ride with endodermal cells during gastrulation (4). His lab also repur-posed the cell's ubiquitin-degradation system as a method to rapidly remove target proteins during specifi c stages of development (5). Nance spoke with JCB about the molecular cues directing gastrulation and how he enjoys nature in the wilds of New York City. Why have you stuck with C. elegans ever since graduate school? I like the fact that you can focus on individual cells in this whole, developing organism. Early on, there are only 26 cells when the movements of gastrulation happen. If you've looked at enough embryos, you can identify all the cells. You know all the parts and where they're supposed to be, so that when you start perturbing them, you can understand what's gone wrong. C. elegans has its own set of developmental problems, too, because it has this invariant embryonic lineage, and so there's not much room for error. Things have to happen the same way every time. It doesn't really tolerate much sloppiness. How did a parade lead you to your postdoctoral studies? Near the end of …