MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play critical roles in embryonic development and are frequently deregulated in human cancers. The let-7 family members are tumor-suppressing miRNAs and are frequently downregulated in cancer cells. Lin-28 and Lin-28B are RNA-binding proteins highly expressed in embryonic tissues. Lin-28 proteins block let-7 precursors from being processed to mature miRNAs by inducing terminal...

Ras-mediated vulval development in C. elegans is inhibited by the functionally redundant sets of class A, B, and C synthetic Multivulva (synMuv) genes. Three of the class B synMuv genes encode an Rb/DP/E2F complex that, by analogy with its mammalian and Drosophila counterparts, has been proposed to silence genes required for vulval specification through chromatin modification and remodeling. Tw...

We describe a general strategy for the genetic mapping in parallel of multiple restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) loci. This approach allows the systematic identification for cloning of physical genetic loci within about 100 kb of any gene in Caenorhabditis elegans. We have used this strategy of parallel RFLP mapping to clone the heterochronic gene lin-14, which controls the timing...

As the founding member of the microRNA (miRNA) gene family, insights into lin-4 regulation and function have laid a conceptual foundation for countless miRNA-related studies that followed. We previously showed that a transcriptional lin-4 reporter in C. elegans was positively regulated by a lin-4-complementary element (LCE), and by lin-4 itself. In this study, we sought to (1) identify addition...