Protein Family Biochemical Function Representative Proteins H. sapiens D. melanogaster C. elegans A. thaliana S. cerevisiae Actin Nucleators Formins associates with barbed ends, promotes nucleation Spir nucleates unbranched fi laments Spir-1, Spir-2 Spir/spire Arp2/3 complex polymerizes Y-branched fi lament networks ARP2,

A protein called SAS-7 is required for daughter centrioles to become mothers in C. elegans.

Cross-modal plasticity is a striking adaptive feature of the brain, whereby the loss of one sensory modality induces cortical reorganization that leads to enhanced sensory performance in remaining modalities. Much is known about the macroscopic modifications in the brain that underly cross-modal plasticity and the associated changes in sensory performance. In contrast there is relatively scant ...

BACKGROUND C. elegans has been established as a powerful genetic system. Use of a chemically defined medium (C. elegans Maintenance Medium (CeMM)) now allows standardization and systematic manipulation of the nutrients that animals receive. Liquid cultivation allows automated culturing and experimentation and should be of use in large-scale growth and screening of animals. RESULTS We find tha...

Availability of food is often a limiting factor in nature. Periods of food abundance are followed by times of famine, often in unpredictable patterns. Reliable information about the environment is a critical ingredient of successful survival strategy. One way to improve accuracy is to integrate information communicated by other organisms. To test whether such exchange of information may play a ...

Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) as a well-established multicellular model organism has been widely used in the biological field for half century. Its numerous advantages including small body size, rapid life cycle, high-reproductive rate, well-defined anatomy, and conserved genome, made C. one of most successful organisms. Discoveries obtained from have great contributions to research field...

This fall marks 20 years since the cloning of unc-119 was reported. Despite having a strong phenotype that makes animals somewhat difficult to grow and handle, unc-119 mutant rescue has become one of the most frequently-used markers for C. elegans transformation. In this Commentary, I describe the history of how unc-119 rescue traveled through the worm community, contributing to the development...

Abstract RNA-based gene control mechanisms pose an elegant and straightforward way to switch on, off, or fine-tune transgene expression without the need for expressing regulatory proteins. A small molecule effector binds directly a ligand-binding aptamer RNA structure thereby modulates of associated target gene. We established genetic switches based on regulation self-cleaving ribozymes polyade...

Progress in aging research has identified genetic and environmental factors that regulate longevity across species. The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans is a genetically tractable model system that has been widely used to investigate the molecular mechanisms of aging, and the development of RNA interference (RNAi) technology has provided a powerful tool for performing large-scale genetic sc...

Molecular changes that underlie evolutionary changes in behavior and physiology are not well understood. Dauer formation in Caenorhabditis elegans is a temperature-sensitive process controlled through a network of signaling pathways associated with sensory neurons and is potentially an excellent system in which to investigate molecular changes in neuronal function during evolution. To begin to ...